JHK’s Three-Act Play, Big Slide
A log mansion in the Adirondack Mountains…
A big family on the run…
A nation in peril…
Visit the Big Slide Page to order, perform, or see sample scenes.

Ho ho ho! It’s that time of year again. Here’s JHK’s holiday classic: A Christmas Orphan.

11-year-old Jeff Greenaway hears his mom and dad argue one night after an office Christmas party. He infers from their garbled squabble that he is an orphan, found in a willow basket on the welcome mat outside their New York apartment. Thinking now that his parents are imposters, he steals away to Grand Central Station and buys a train ticket to Drakesville, Vermont, where he intends to start life all over again.Print | Kindle | Kobo (Digital) | Barnes & Noble (Digital)

S ometimes societies just go crazy. Japan, 1931, Germany, 1933. China, 1966. Spain 1483, France, 1793, Russia, 1917, Cambodia, 1975, Iran, 1979, Rwanda, 1994, Congo, 1996, to name some. By “crazy” I mean a time when anything goes, especially mass killing. The wheels came off the USA in 1861, and though the organized slaughter developed an overlay of romantic historical mythos — especially after Ken Burns converted it into a TV show — the civilized world to that time had hardly ever seen such an epic orgy of death-dealing.

I doubt that I’m I alone in worrying that America today is losing its collective mind. Our official relations with other countries seem perfectly designed to provoke chaos. The universities have melted into toxic sumps beyond even anti-intellectualism to a realm of hallucination. Demented gunmen mow down total strangers weekly in what looks like a growing competition to end their miserable lives with the highest victim score. The financial engineers have done everything possible to pervert and undermine the operations of markets. The political parties are committing suicide by cluelessness and corruption.

There is no narrative for our behavior toward Russia that makes sense anymore. Our campaign to destabilize Ukraine worked out nicely, didn’t it? And then we acted surprised when Russia reclaimed the traditionally Russian territory of Crimea, with its crucial warm-water naval ports. Who woulda thought? Then we attempted to antagonize them further with economic sanctions. The net effect is that Vladimir Putin ended up looking more rational and sane than any leader in the NATO coalition.

Lately, Russia has filled the vacuum of competence in Syria, cleaning up a mess that America left with its two-decade-long crusade to leave a train of broken governments everywhere in the region. A few weeks back, Mr. Putin made the point before the UN General Assembly that wrecking every national institution in sight among weak and unstable nations was probably not a recipe for world peace. President Obama never did formulate a coherent comeback to that. It’s a little terrifying to realize that the leader of our former arch-adversary is the only figure onstage who can come up with a credible story about what needs to happen there. And his restraint this week following what may have been a US-assisted shoot-down of a Russian bomber by idiots in Turkey is really estimable. It all looks like a feckless slide provoked by our side into World War III, and for what? To make the world safe for the Kardashians?

The uproars on campus before Thanksgiving are more a reflection on the astounding cowardice of college presidents than the foolishness of young minds — which, being not fully formed, are easily susceptible to idealist figments. The adults in charge ought to know better. Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber actually entertained the “demand” to erase Woodrow Wilson’s presence on campus for being an arch-segregationist by a black “social justice league” that at the very same time demanded separate (i.e. segregated) social space for blacks only. How did he reconcile these pleadings in his own mind, I wonder.

President Biddy Martin of Amherst pandered to students protesting against free speech, saying:

“Over the course of several days, a significant number of students have spoken eloquently and movingly about their experiences of racism and prejudice on and off campus. The depth and intensity of their pain and exhaustion are evident. That pain is real. Their expressions of loneliness and sense of invisibility are heartrending. No attempt to minimize or trivialize those feelings will be convincing to those of us who have listened. It is good that our students have seized this opportunity to speak, rather than further internalizing the isolation and lack of caring they have described.”

Bottom line: hurt feelings supposedly cancel free speech. No, that’s exactly the opposite of the meaning of the First Amendment. How can a college president fail to understand that and fail to defend the campus against that sort of Jacobin despotism? The answer is they are hostage to dogmas cooked up by race-and-identity careerists who don’t really care to make distinctions between what is true and what is not true — and that is now the official tone of higher education in America. It’s a short hop from there to not knowing the difference between what is real and what is unreal.

The phenomenon of demented lone gunmen killing strangers and innocents will morph into civil insurrection, especially as the major political parties break apart and the loosed factions set out to settle their old scores by whatever means they can. History knows that violence is infectious and that social inhibitions melt away when the conditions are ripe. Groups give themselves permission to act outside the bounds of normal behavior, and all of a sudden atrocity is the order of the day.

Both Trump and Hillary have the mojo to destroy their respective parties and I think the probability is that they will. Unfortunately, we don’t live under a parliamentary system that recognizes smaller factions as legitimate parties, so we are sure to live through an era of political disorder. What emerges from that could be a very severe polity, since it will be based on the wish to restore order at all costs.

It is likely to get the shove it needs from the implosion of the financial system, which is now running on the fumes of dwindling credit. A false capitalism reigns based on false capital — notional wealth where there is really no wealth; value where there is no value. Moments like this in history beat a path straight to currency collapse, and that will open the door to a greater collapse of all our familiar arrangements.

Surely there is some kind of massive unseen sensory organ in societies that receives the signal that systems are failing. And surely it spooks the individuals who make up those societies so badly that they will believe anything and do anything.

Coming in 2016
World Made By Hand 4 (and final)

The third World Made By Hand novel

!! Is available !!

(The Fourth and final is complete
and in production for May 2016 publication)

“Kunstler skewers everything from kitsch to greed, prejudice, bloodshed, and brainwashing in this wily, funny, rip-roaring, and profoundly provocative page- turner, leaving no doubt that the prescriptive yet devilishly satiric A World Made by Hand series will continue.” — Booklist

About James Howard Kunstler

James Howard Kunstler is the author of many books including (non-fiction) The Geography of Nowhere, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, Home from Nowhere, The Long Emergency, and Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology and the Fate of the Nation. His novels include World Made By Hand, The Witch of Hebron, Maggie Darling — A Modern Romance, The Halloween Ball, an Embarrassment of Riches, and many others. He has published three novellas with Water Street Press: Manhattan Gothic, A Christmas Orphan, and The Flight of Mehetabel.

Actually, as a gentleman, based on your assertion, I gave you the point until you were proven wrong. Since Q. is looked upon by CFN “shitizens” as an expert on such matters, I appealed to him for a ruling. Nevertheless, again as a gentleman, it remains your point until you are satisfied and concede. Now the question–do you require a second opinion? If so, this time you may select the judge. -Sticks

While stickling, but trying to keep it just this side of over-stickling, I believe names referred to by letters which don’t make up words (even made-up words) because they can’t be pronounced that way are called “Initialisms.”

Since the CIA funds its black ops with the “off budget” opium cash crop, aka the Poppy plant, it’s only fitting an ex-CIA chief have the nickname “Poppy”. Keeping the world safe for chefs, insurgents and assholes, one pallet of cash at a time!

Thanks for making the connection for me…and, “Thank you for your servitude!” -Sticks

“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors, and school teachers. Such propagandists accomplish their greatest triumphs, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects… totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have done by the most eloquent denunciations, the most compelling of logical rebuttals.” – Aldous Huxley – 1946 revised foreword to Brave New World

How many of us are already wage-slaves? Neil Postman’s point in the book “Amusing Ourselves to Death” is that Huxley’s dystopia of plenty not only is more appealing than Orwell’s dystopia of deprivation but also that we live in The Brave New World already.

Occulus Rift will finally bring the Feelies to us. We have Soma in many forms already. Remember, ending is better than mending!

Neil Postman lamented the dummying down of American intellectual prowness by the replacement of the printed word for news coverage by video. Thought is no longer necessary to be well informed. Critical thought stimulated by reading and writing is suppressed by video. Occulus Rift is video on steroids and will cultivate many a fool.

In the modern age the talking head does the thinking for you while the hand once used to hold something to write with instead presses a gamepad and cultivates mindless aggression while the brain sleeps.

“Occulus Rift will finally bring the Feelies to us. We have Soma in many forms already.”

Yes, Soma could mean the drug, bras and panties from Soma or the PS4/PC game…or maybe all three at the same time to experience the Feelies. Many decades ago there was an article in Playboy (yeah, I actually read some) about being connected by some device from afar to a group of people and experiencing sex. ClusterFuck Nation made possible, haha!

Thanks to Sticks, Smokey and Dog for mentioning Brave New World. I’ll have to read it again during this long, cold Minnesota winter. Anything to remove my focus on current events.

You got to be kidding!! What a small world it really is. I, too, spent three years at the Air Farce base up on the hill. September 1961 through September 1964.

My AFSC was 32251A which means I worked on the F-106 interceptors MA-1 electronic system. I froze my ass off in the wintertime as the northwest winds whipped across the flight line. I used to think of my counterpart in bases across USSR and felt sorry for those poor bastards freezing their asses off!

Were you in during the Cuban missile crisis? I got sent down to Volk field near Wisconsin Dells for two weeks since an attack by USSR seemed all too real and our 11th FIS planes were dispersed to several alternate air fields.

I had sever problems and pain with my hands from the terrible cold (smoking Lucky Strikes probably didn’t help with blood circulation) and finally got an assignment the last winter to debrief the pilots after their sorties and to analyze the radar scope films and WSEM analog/digital tapes to determine if they might or might not have hit their simulated targets. That’s when I learned to present unpleasant news diplomatically.

There was the old joke about the Finlander who got on the bus and asked “Does this bus go DUL-LUTH” and the driver said “No, it goes beep-beep”. What a groaner, huh.

Wow. I’m glad you mentioned this. I might add that I have always liked your comments on this forum.

One guy announces to the bar, “The only thing that comes out of Green Bay are Packers and ugly Whores. The guy next to him says pointedly, “My wife comes from Green Bay.” The first guy responds, “Oh, what position does she play?”

So prophetic and oh so true. Those who rule over this nation of the distracted all read this in their youth and obviously realized the truth and the importance of these words. All that is needed to be done at this point in the game is to change the motto from “Home of the Free and the Brave” to “Place Where Placated Cowards Congregate”. That would at least eliminate the deception issue.

And I will add to your quote this one from Woodrow Wilson regarding the formation of “The Federal Reserve”:

“I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world. No longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.”
~ Woodrow Wilson

Jim, thank you for such a concise summary of our national afflictions. I’ve been aware of our gradual dissolution since 1968, although I suspect it was happening earlier.

The big question, I think, is why? The answers have to be profound. Is there a built-in destructive mechanism for advanced societies? Do finite resources guarantee ultimate collapse? Are there some fundamental flaws written into human DNA?

I guess it’s just me that needs answers because I’m naturally curious, and if I’m going down in flames along with most everyone else, I’d like to know why.

Why? Because success brings prosperity and prosperity is a breeding ground for GREED. I will always look back at that moment when Gordon Gecko spoke those prophetic words, “Greed is Good”. For me, it signaled the beginning of the end for I knew that those three words would spread throughout our society like the cancer that they are, and so they have, sealing our fate.

Who knew that Michael Douglas would be the person most responsible for destroying what’s left of our society? I think Ayn Rand, and her philosophy of selfishness, had more to do with it. I understand her works are still very popular in the corporate boardrooms.

Besides being one of the most verbose literary works I have ever read, Atlas Shrugged was also one of the largest distortions of reality ever penned. While her assessment of governments as parasitic cancers on all societies over which they rule was a law of nature (yes some DO start out as benevolent), the idea that those who invent, create and build become the mega wealthy class is pure BS. The Doer’s and Builders of the world usually can make out very well when they utilize their skills and talents to construct profitable endeavors, but in the end a mega wealthy parasite ALWAYS comes along and buys them out, puts them out of business or takes over in any one of the modes of treachery that they always utilize. The Mega Wealthy are the bags of dirt that always buy the prostitutes in governments and bend them to their will. It is the oldest story ever told and will never go away unless there is a great collapse and even then, in the end, they will rise once again to the top of the dung heap. It is our challenge to find little bits of life to enjoy despite the corruption, which like scum, always rises to the top.

I operate on the principle that there are only 2 basic emotions: Love and fear. All the good deeds and feelings arise out of love, and all the bad arise out of fear. Much of fear is the result of brain malware in the fight or flight area of the brain, which apparently is very easy to develop. I would say that much of the root cause of greed occurs out of a hyperactive and unrealistic fear that one is not going to have enough.

I think the wheels started coming off the bus with the secretive and conspiratorial creation of The Federal Reserve at the famous Jekyll Island retreat. The conspirators even traveled there in disguise and with the train windows blackened out.

Woodrow Wilson would later regret his hand in its creation.

Then in 1945 when the CIA was created all the lug nuts on the wheels were completely loosened.

In 1962, when Lemnitzer from The Joint Chiefs of Staff came to Bobby Kennedy and JFK proposing “Operation Northwoods” and the Kennedy brothers nixed that idea, a few wheels went flying off. Just imagine a military scheme to blow up a U.S. passenger jet and blame it on Cuba to rile the American people into a call for war?!

JFK’s brains being blown all over Dealey Plaza in broad daylight, then having LBJ appoint Allen Dulles to the Warren Commission after JFK had fired him as head of the CIA took another wheel off the bus.

David Talbot has a new book out: “The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, The CIA and the Rise of America’s Secret Government” which details the power of Dulles. After being fired by JFK “the CIA should be torn into a thousand pieces and scattered to the wind”, Dulles continued to hold court with his fellow intelligence “U.S. Full Spectrum Dominance” compatriots at a home in the D.C. area.

By then, IMHO, there were NO wheels on our collective bus and the American people have been filled with nothing but propaganda with the intent of there being a “New World Order” with the United States as the worlds sole “super power” and with the United States having “full spectrum military dominance” over the entire planet.

Every Democrat and Republican who entire Congress understand that this is the objective of the U.S. government. Obviously it has nothing to do with “democracy” or “freedom” or “justice for all”.

Since 9/11 our country has been living in a state of “National Emergency” which according to some (Peter Dale Scott) entailed suspending the Constitution. And when George W. Bush and Barack Obama sign a continuance of that directive every year, plus the Patriot Act, plus the NDAA and the Military Commissions Act, it is pretty freakin’ clear that Peter Dale Scott and David Talbot are on to something.

Until the American people can discover the TRUTH about our ugly history, including all the wars we have delivered to the Third World, we will have no wheels on our collective bus so we can finally move forward.

Funny that the motto of the CIA is a quote from Jesus Christ: “Seek ye the truth and the truth shall set ye free.”

Outstanding comment, abbybwood! Of course, one will never discover the TRUTH in schools, which are little more than propaganda factories. We did vote for change 7 years ago when we elected Obama – and have been sorely disappointed. Look at who’s running now. All hope is lost.

Who’s running now? No one of any ability or having any sense of morality. I hate to not vote, and yet only a write in would be justified in the coming POTUS elections.

How about JHK as write in for POTUS? It seems natural, since our Nation is a CFN.

Seriously, though… if ever a third party or write in could win an election, it would have to be in 2016. I gave up on both parties in 1968… have voted for every third party candidate since then. And stopped voting for Libertarians when it became obvious they were all idiots who thought Ayn Rand was some sort of prophet.

You see that’s it. Rockefeller took over the school system in 1913. He indoctrinated all American children with a false history of America i.e. that we were the good guys. All those children are now America. From 2 -80 years of age. All taught the same lies. It is nearly impossible as Mark Twain famously said, to convince people they’ve been lied to; it is far easier to lie to them. America is now as evil and decadent as Rome. Porn. Pro sports. The whole gay thing shoved down our throats. I’m sure the emperors had their own word for diversity when they brought back all those slaves. Debauched currency enforced at the barrel of a gun. De Gaulle said it best in that book you are referencing about JFK. America does not want to know. It does not want to find out. The truth would be devastating.

Jim, you left Spain, 1936 out of your list of societies that went insane. I fear we will cry out for a strutting clown like Franco to come save…oh, never mind. We have several strutting clowns who ignore facts and spin reality on stage already.

With respect to the topic: I’ve been thinking, and writing, about my own experiences with “crazy getting crazier” for a while. I’m not entirely convinced it is a deformity of human genetics, no more than I’m convinced that the absence of massive baby-births in Japan is both a rational AND expected response to the stresses on Japanese society. Japan, in many ways, is another extreme example of our current world – pointing the way to where we are headed. Unlike Japan, I don’t expect our society to fair well at all.

In grad school, a long time ago, I read a paper by a Dr. Davies “Towards a theory of Revolution”. For years since that reading, in the mid 1990’s, I’ve suspected that both the USA (for its own reasons) and CHINA were headed for a world of hurt.

We will see what form this madness takes – but I’m not convinced it is “madness” as much as a discontinuous response to a world that has limits. Limits to food, space, energy, etc.

I’m not so sure any of this is so crazy. It just looks crazy because it’s happening all around us, in “real time.” In history books, it looks more orderly and it only takes a few paragraphs to happen.

What I think is happening is what happens when an Empire falls apart. It seems in every age, there’s one system of getting things done that gains dominance, and the culture using that system becomes the leading Empire. Almost as soon as they reach the height of power, that power starts to wane. This happens because the Elites who get to the top of the top start to protect their advantages, and it was the dynamism that threatened their permanent advantage that made the system supreme in the first place; by safeguarding themselves, the Elites ensure the eventual failure of the system.

Naturally all of this has myriad and nasty effects on all of us, in different ways depending on our position relative to and stake in the Empire. If we’re Syrians it forces us out of our homes and regions. If we’re Europeans we’re seeing all these foreigners showing up, and the urge to undo much of what we’ve been trying to work toward in terms of a single European entity. If we’re Saudis we’re realizing our kids may be riding camels again, as our grandparents did.

Sadly, chaos and violence aren’t such unusual conditions for humans. It’s just been quite a while since it was our turn, here in the Seat of Imperium.

It is the Jim Jones cult writ large, if that is not included in the calculations then there is no legitimate calculation being made.

And America can possibly end the same way, but remember what was the final impetus that drove the “revolutionary suicide” and that was some doofus congressman flying down and innocently asking if anyone wanted to just go home on his plane. Less than a dozen wanted to leave that failing enterprise, yet the paranoia and disappointments of that nonsensical reality denying cult of personality were exposed and that was it, it descended into violence because of the witless fanatics wished against reality. Note; Jim Jones was forced to drink the death potion by his armed minders.

It will happen here when someone just asks the population if they want to be free of Political Correctness (means the reign of the Left with the aid of the Right). Remember Slobadan Milosovich uttered one sentence to an assembled crowd about freeing the Serbs from the oppression of the state, and that was it.

Nice set of ideas, JHK. Thanks for putting them out there and providing a place to comment. And now people, follow the money.

Consider the (only?) Black Lives Matter movement as one example of a group dedicated to promulgation of “dogmas cooked up by race-and-identity careerists.” Would BLM exist without massive financial support from some outside force? That seems unlikely.

“The big question, I think, is why? The answers have to be profound. Is there a built-in destructive mechanism for advanced societies? Do finite resources guarantee ultimate collapse? Are there some fundamental flaws written into human DNA? ”

That is the million-dollar question. It may be that humankind would have done better if we had not found fossil fuels in such abundance; it is “civilizational cocaine” which can give a huge boost, but isn’t sustainable.

We all want to know why, yes. My add on question to this has always been, “Why are so few of us seeing it in the first place?”

JMG wrote ““By some blend of dumb luck and happenstance, though, I missed out on the sense of entitlement so pervasive among those born when the United States was at the zenith of its prosperity and power.”

Ten generations per dynasty in general. Of course in real Civilizations, another dynasty rises up, usually a few hundred miles away. America will never rise again though – far too diverse. Homogeneity is strength.

Maybe part or parts of it will feel and desire some continuity with the past – the White parts. We may also be able to pick up parts of Conservative Canada that find Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto alien and incomprehensible. But as for the Southwest, Northeast, most of the Midwest and South – they’re history, Black and Brown history. And/or crazy liberal land.

The causative factors you already know:
-Population overshoot in the “developing world” coupled to population reduction in the first world. Hence all this “migration” and the troubles that follows it.
– Advent of hypercomputing: permits the well connected to be well ” much better” connected in terms of finance, resources, research, development and power consolidation in general. For the hoi polloi its really just a toy – Happy CYber MOnday all you wonderful shoppers. Fartbook your friends what shit you bought today yay.
– The real effects of two generations raised on the “Perfect Machine” (tip of the hat to Joyce Nelson.) The TV medium produced a civilization (in the West) that has come to believe its own fantasy narratives – from love and marriage (see the destruction of both via any statistical analysis of trends) to crime and punishment ( serial killers and mass murderers only have one hour to get the story completed in between commercials and the next NFL game.)
– Where the environment is expendable as the next bit of useless infotainment, there you have the turning of once a terrestrial paradise into the festering, e-coli laden, radioactive, gooey mass of waste product asphalt and cars from Fukushima to Ft Worth and back to Fukien.
– Then there is that religion problem: holy shit indeed.
The question is at bottom I think: is there any cure for the mass criminal psychosis that plague earths peopled civilization?
Warning: Don’t ask questions you do not want to know the answer to
–

I turned on the local newscast on Friday, it was all about getting out and buying stuff. I turned it off again.
I did learn something on a BBC broadcast. It seems that they’ve bought into the Black Friday consumer holiday, even though they don’t have a Thanksgiving for it to be the day after.
It’s kind of like the way the Christian church incorporated the pagan holidays into theirs.

I very much enjoyed the latest Kunstlercast 272 with Taggart/Martenson and the explanation of the multiplicities of capital & a very good synopsis of where we are and where we are going collectively.

You know, perhaps what will happen is simply a method the collective consciousness is using to force the human animal into/ (or rather, back to), a more naturalistic lifeway & folkway for societal organization & how we relate to one another.

Speaking of strutting political clowns, what’s up with “The Donald” and that ridiculous red baseball cap pulled nearly halfway down his face ? From the looks of it, the red cap conveniently casts a obscuring shadow over lying eyes darting here and there. And when not wearing the ‘Red Shadow Caster’, “The Donald” seeks to comb what little hair he has left over his eyes, “Cousin Itt” style.

No doubt if Truman were alive today there would be a slightly revised repeat of his “Nixon is shifty-eyed goddamn liar” theme.

I remember back in the past, when politicians at least attempted to sound sane, compared to now when you have crazies like Cruz & Fiorina, not to mention the rest of the wacky ones. America is definitely losing it’s collective mind. Read some of the rhetoric out there, it’s crazy. It’s a race to the bottom, with the right wing in the lead.

Rubio (nothing but a younger McCain clone) and Hillary actually scare me much more than does Trump. Trump’s the only one saying he can work with Putin, and he questions why Obama is so insistent on getting rid of Assad in Syria. Trump may be our best hope of avoiding WWIII – that is if it doesn’t start before Obama leaves office, which looks like a 50/50 proposition.

Trump is delusional at best. He can’t remember one of his lies from another and does he even realize that there is a camera trained on him whenever he speaks. He tries to deny what he has said on camera one day with a radio appearance the next day. Of course the MSM just move on to his next outrageous statement, insult or insane comment about whomever.

All designed to keep the attention firmly focused on him, at no cost to his campaign or apparently his credibility. At least with anyone from the Pro Wraslin’ crowd, who seem to have real short memories and attention spans anyhow.

I’ve actually heard a few theories about how he is a Clinton puppet, designed to distract attention from the more reasonable candidates. As their campaigns flounder and they lose the ability to raise funds, he will drop out and Hillary becomes our next president with little more than lip service from the “right”.

PBS has become my refuge in the post Thanksgiving advertising and political blitz season. Of course they always use this period to beg for donations every 20 minutes, but it’s better than Target commercials.

Thank you for your continuing efforts at producing such ascerbic screeds.

How would Monday seem blah without them?

As far the “thesis” as such of your current exposition – you must have read over that one guy Carl Jung – you know back in school?

wiki says : Collective unconscious, a term coined by Carl Jung, refers to structures of the unconscious mind which are shared among beings of the same species. According to Jung, the human collective unconscious is populated by instincts and by archetypes: universal symbols such as the Great Mother, the Wise Old Man, the Shadow, the Tower, Water, the Tree of Life, and many more.

This weeks rant seems to be a good assessment of what is going on but there is hardly a thought as to why. That it just happens and sometimes society just looses its mind is a weak substitute for an explanation.

That what is reported and brought to the public arena is but the tip of an iceberg of all that could be reported. As college education no longer leads to employment there is a need for less college education so ‘forces’ are at work to discredit the experience. Hmmmmmmmmm.

Demented gunmen are encouraged for their work paves the way for tyranny and the expansion of the terror state which is now big business. Like our war on drugs it must and will be maintained for simple economic reasons. If a gun toting crazy even sneezes it will be reported on and played up. That is the agenda.

“Our official relations with other countries seem perfectly designed to provoke chaos.” Ahhhh duh! And since this chaos is resulting in low low fill up while you can because this can’t last gas prices murder mayhem and the continued destabilization of the rest of the world will continue. That is the agenda. Change sick bastards can believe in.

“Surely there is some kind of massive unseen sensory organ in societies that receives the signal that systems are failing. And surely it spooks the individuals who make up those societies so badly that they will believe anything and do anything.”

Yes and for us it is called the American Mass Media. And the part of the corpus this organ lives in is below the belt. It receives appropriate signals from below the beltway and broadcasts spookiness to a population so distracted by trivia they are primed to believe almost anything. Anything that is so long as it is totally unconnected to reality. In America real reality is a poor simulacrum to its replacement; video reality. And video reality is the basis for a new economy of extreme social stratification which better fits the dilemma of resource distribution.

‘The Story Line Dissolves’ but that is how progress is manifesting itself now. Progress progresses, just not always in a good way. Though some always seem to make out like bandits.

You should count yourself lucky to have a coop that needs cleaning. I have a coop that needs chickens. Need to take some days off this spring to make that happen. I need to train the dogs to appreciate that these new critters are our friends, and they need to protect them.

Mass shootings used to be once a year. Now there once a week. Policeman shooting citizens in cold blood are now commonplace and always the same tired line. I was in fear of my life from an unarmed man while holding a pistol aimed at him. I think you’re right Kunstler. We are disintegrating.

JHK writes:
“Both Trump and Hillary have the mojo to destroy their respective parties and I think the probability is that they will. Unfortunately, we don’t live under a parliamentary system that recognizes smaller factions as legitimate parties, so we are sure to live through an era of political disorder. What emerges from that could be a very severe polity, since it will be based on the wish to restore order at all costs.”

It’s my belief that our present electoral system assures that only the oiliest scum (most thoroughly corrupted?) rises to the top…. pre-approved by the “right” people, of course.

If we combine your thoughts of “events are in charge” with the certain rise of a blatant form of authoritarianism, either Trump or Hillary should fit the bill nicely for the dissolution of our rapidly fragmenting ‘society’. Do we [as a nation] need to go through collapse and the following terror of totalitarianism to finally come to a reasoned agreement about what the commonweal should consist of? Although I shudder to think it, maybe so. Let the tumbrels roll; even if they should come for me.

…And what was it all for? I would opine that it was all to sell us loads of crap we never needed. How was it done? Madison Ave. and all public mouthpieces were conscripted by the already uber-wealthy to tell us that we *did indeed* need all this shit to be happy (and in the most venal of instances: as a reflection of patriotism). This is the end-point and upshot of all this religion of Growth that we’ve been carefully fed. (I can’t turn on any info-media without the word ‘growth’ being repeated over and over like some magical incantation and cure-all.)

Well, it’s hard to put the Genie back in the bottle in terms of “loads of crap”. People love their I Phones and apps, and it’s pretty amazing to be able to upload an image of a hand made product and sell it to a person half way around the world on that very same day. Or upload a song and sell it online via what some might term as load of crap merchandise.

Do you have a cell phone or even an I-Phone? I do and it’s hard to believe that once upon a time a person would have to hunt down a phone booth in case of emergency. But then again, I don’t recall being any less happy back in those days. But to repeat, it’s that genie back in the bottle thing. Momentum naturally rolls the way of more and more, hence the ‘can getting kicked down the road’ to the surprise of so many.

I agree with you Buck that it is technically amazing but ultimately not really that fulfilling. If we are lucky, we might wake up one day in the future and think: WTF were we doing (as we go about our business in a World made by Hand [again]). But, I don’t think we will be that lucky. Who knows?

It is amazing. Slightly off topic, something I find not amazing but confounding, I bought a gift for someone who lives half a world away. The gift was made in China, sold in an American store, and three bucks out of a ten dollar cost would go to a charity. Then mailing that gift costs more than double the price of the gift. How does it get here, costs and profits included, for ten bucks, and sending it out again costs more? Why, at a time when we have more and more people here who come from distant lands and presumably want to send things back and forth, did the post office end delivery by ship? Is it to force us to buy online? I don’t get it.

No phone here Buck. If you want me I have a landline. Lived my life without a cell. Why would I need one now? I still use paper maps and ride a ’63 and ’68 MC. As a side point, when the power was down for a week in 2011 my phone worked and the cells were down. People will freak when their cells don’t work and the ‘taters won’t know the difference!

I had the same response several years ago when I was in the states. One of the neighbors children was in our house and wanted to call home to let his mother know where he was. I showed him the rotary phone in the kitchen and said – have at it.

You would have thought from the expression on his face that he was looking at the Phaistos Disk.

When my children were young they got in their grandfather’s car and were completely baffled by the manual window cranks on the car doors. They had never seen anything but electric car windows. Too funny! -Sticks

Yes, cell phones cause brain cancer. But that was shoved under the rug. Who can argue with Convenience? Surely, a new god. Your task: how to portray this concept? Male? Female? Animal? The Priesthood leaves it to you. Of course we have veto power, but you will be paid for both your time and the ultimate product. Get sketching and we’ll kick it around.

Maybe it is only wishful thinking, but as our host has hinted at in the past, there may come a point when some cadre of military folks step up to the plate and say enough is enough. Hopefully not religious fundamentalists at heart, just practical, disgruntled patriots.

It would be good for the US and the rest of the world if they just locked the place down for at least 6 months, and then after that forced the country to backoff and adopt an isolationist position.

The first thing that needs to be re-established is a working criminal justice system. Law and order at all levels. Some top level prosecutions that involved lengthy jail terms would be a good start.

It would be tricky (the NWO nuts would go ballistic), but it might actually be our best chance at getting back to some level of sanity.

Pretty scary stuff abbybwood. Could see it being very easily used to take command, but end up with the US ending up looking like a theocracy. And where it would go from there, I don’t even want to imagine.

Yes, and Political Correctness is by far the most powerful cult in the military – thus the forced retirement of countless generals, the coming forced introduction of women into combat and even the special forces, tranny soldiers, etc.

Your hatred of Christianity is no less abhorrent even though it is common clay, just like you.

If you want a few suggestions about that law and order at all levels thingie, here goes – unsolicited and worth the price:

1. Think hard about what should be illegal before you start incarcerations. Jail time is expensive.
2. The mandatory sentencing guidelines we already have enacted have proven to be unjust and unworkable. Before you send people away for a long time, make sure that they are guilty, and make sure what they did is deserving of strong punishment.
3. Give some real thought to whether you want criminal justice to be remedial or punitive. Or both.

There is going to be a new world order… just not what the “nuts” think it will be. The shakeout of that will be tricky, dirty, and take time. Have patience and be part of the solution when the time comes. Meanwhile, keep the faith.

Good points. One other consideration: do we want jails to be run by profit making corporations whose bottom line is enhanced the longer they can keep you imprisoned? Corrections should be run by nonpartisan civil service employees with fixed salaries who have no incentive to keep you in prison for decades for a minor nonviolent infraction like not wearing a seatbelt.

I do agree with JHK with one exception. This currency bullshit has gone global. It’s not just a US problem except we have the reserve currency which China now wants a piece of. The issue is all currencies are worthless these days. China proved that by dumping $30-35 trillion into it’s eCONomy. The Euro and Yen are also crap currencies. So if a reset is coming which I don’t doubt for a minute, it will take all the paper currencies with it. The big question when the reset occurs, will the eCONomies around the world come to a screeching HALT and everything STOPS?

How do you keep crazy’s from getting their hands on guns? All of these people are on SSRI drugs. I mean has anyone put 2 and 2 together and said no one on these drugs can own or purchase a firearm. Or launched an awareness program about the dangers of these drugs.

It’s telling to do any research on the subject of SSRI drug use and violent behavior correlation, especially as it pertains to mass shootings. All of the legacy/national/mainstream sources dismiss it out of hand, and place the blame primarily on “easy access to guns.” But it’s interesting when you think about the main sources of information they use, Doctors, Psychiatrists, and Scientists with a vested interest in the continued proliferation and use of these drugs, the continued and ever-expanding prescription of these medications…and when it seems that a disproportionate number of these actors were in fact on (or withdrawing from) one or another version of these drugs when they committed some random act. Also consider how these mass shootings have ramped up during the same period that these drugs began to be widely prescribed. Add to that the fact that in spite of ever increasing numbers of guns in private hands, the murder and violent crime rate has continued to go down during this same time period. It just doesn’t add up.

Remember that movie “The Happening,” where some gas borne agent when inhaled would make you kill yourself. How far off is that? They are creating drugs that make you want to murder other people or yourself. If ever a drug needed regulating, this drug would be it but nothing is done. Why? This is NAZI Germany, creating mind control drugs. I mean if they have a drug that they can coax you into taking and it does these things, is it not plausible they have a drug they can get into you without you knowing that will do the same.

We seem to be ‘solving’ the Middle East problem by divvying up the population and giving the Western nations their ‘fair share’. It reminds me of what I’ve seen happen with so-called failing schools, the schools get shut down and the students get redistributed. It doesn’t work, so they are going to do more of it.
College presidents owe their livelihood to the Higher Ed racket, and if the students ever catch on to that, they will be scrambling to piece together whatever part-time low-wage employment they can find until they are old enough to collect their pension. Better to keep them distracted with nonsense.
I think that Vladimir Putin is as shrewd as Obama wishes he (Obama) was.

“Hello darkness my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence

In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
‘Neath the halo of a street lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence

Fools said I You do not know
Silence like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you
But my words like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of silence

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the signs said The words of the prophets are
written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sounds of silence”

Accepting unreality in place of reality starts with the acceptance of a small lie as the truth. You may not believe the lie, you may KNOW it isn’t true. But you don’t dissent, you, like almost everyone else, goes along to get along and so you act as if it IS true.

Then, what the hell, if acceptance of that small lie was ok, then maybe acceptance of a slightly bigger lie is ok too. The slightly bigger lie may even follow logically from the smaller lie.

Why do people do this? For many reasons. Few things feel so good as the good regard of your fellows and your bosses. Loyalty given, rewards for loyalty received.

Before you know it, there’s a matrix of lies, lies metastasising more lies. And, not only that, but action follows the lies. Because if you say you believe, you must ACT as if you believe.

So in White Hose and Pentagon meeting rooms, the legend that Saddam Hoosain is developing nukes starts to fester.

Besides, it’s true, Saddam has a prior history, the Israelis took out that nuclear plant in ’82, Saddam used gas on Iraqi Kurds, Saddam was building super-artillery tubes.

So the notion that Saddam has a WMD program isn’t so far-fetched.

All the advisors, all the uniforms, all nod, all agree. It’s all true, nobody disputes it, the intelligence shows it. And, if you believe it, then action must follow. Besides, even if it isn’t true, do you want to take a chance?

OK, sez Dubya, so Saddam has a nucular weapons program, we’re settled on that. Right? Right, everyone nods. Can he be taken out? Chuckles all around, yes, of course, flea-bag Eye-rack will be easy work. Right? Everyone nods, right.

Love your analysis of untruth or less known as the Unified Theory of Mendacity.

You just forgot one darn thing – it was Dubya’s daddy “Popi” H.G.W. Bush, who decided that Iraq was the perfect place to initiate the “Project for The New American Century” and the “New World Order…” a decade earlier. Remember Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm? Yep – brought to you by the Bush clan and “advisors” who also assisted Dubya in his follies. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perl et. al. Names sickening enough to make anyone with a shred of conscience puke.

Now because politiks is a “Family Bizness” folks, John Ellis “JEB!” Bush wants a turn at the wheel. Or Hillary. But it doesn’t matter because the outcome is predetermined. And not in a good way either.

Bush 1 has been out of office for 25 years. Why not blame Jimmy Carter and the ‘Carter Doctrine’, which stated Middle east oil is a vital American resource and we would mobilize to protect access to it, or FDR, who made various treaties with the Saud family on the Arabian Peninsula when he realized domestic petroleum was running low and we’d be needing that middle east oil in the future?

We could certainly start with any of those “leaders” and discover how the actions they took then have created the real, concrete, actuality we live in today.

Yet it was Popi Bush who brought the entire U.S.military establishment, and quite a large part of the “free” world’s too, to the dance of death in the Kuwaiti and Iraqi desert 25 years ago. We are still there and don’t think for a moment we did not help directly or indirectly create those fun loving rascals of ISIS/ISIL/DAESH.

To believe there are no consequences to behavior (or policy) is the manifestation of some seriously disordered thought processes, also known as psychosis. Yes, we help put very well provided-for psychos in power and in government – here and around the world. Fucking brilliant!

American interventionism , wherever on the planet it has occurred, on the whole it seems, has been a giant fucking catastrophe.

Yes, the “Green Zone Czar” really put a stake in the heart of the middle east by disbanding the Iraqi Army and forbidding Baathists in the new government… All Arthur Bremer did was attempt an assassination.

You’re right. His shock upon reading the Middle East planning document seemed sincere and his willingness to go public over it took courage. But we must not forget Clark, like Al Haig before him, was a pretty boy political animal. In Clark’s case, he was a rare, uber-liberal general and very tight with the Clintons. Thankfully, his political ambitions were stymied by the electorate’s lack of interest in him.

Another incisive essay by Mr. Hedges. Thanks for putting the link up, Don.

“But what the Republican elites have done, as they now realize to their horror, is empower a huge swath of the public—largely white—that is gripped by magical thinking and fetishizes violence.”

Sounds almost like Chris has been following CFN. But no mention of NASCAR or clown costumes, haha.

“It was only a matter of time before a demagogue whom these elites could not control would ride the wave of alienation and rage. If Trump fails in his bid to become the GOP presidential nominee, another demagogue will emerge to take his place. Trump is not making a political revolution. He is responding to one.”

Yeah, like last night in New Haven, where pampered undergrads at Yale were demonstrating for ‘safe space’ just a week or two ago, and last night an elderly 79 year old man walking home from work in the early evening was assaulted and beaten nearly to death by 5 ‘Youts’, stripped of all valuables, and left bleeding and unconscious on the wet pavement. News states he’s in and out of a coma.

Lunch today at the World Global Warming Summit; a buffet featuring some of the rarest and most expensive food on the planet, including Kobe beef, caviar, and a duck that’s almost extinct, washed down with $1000 per bottle champagne chilled just right. What, you think these luminaries are going to save the world eating hotdogs and drinking Coca Cola? Well think again. Cost of this single chowdown?, upwards of $1,000,000.

“Lunch today at the World Global Warming Summit; a buffet featuring some of the rarest and most expensive food on the planet, including Kobe beef, caviar, and a duck that’s almost extinct, washed down with $1000 per bottle champagne chilled just right.” BRH

Well, of course, BRH. They are the potentates. We elect them. What do you think they eat when they are at home? Coke and hotdogs? You just don’t get to hear about it.

Really BRH, what is the point of being a potentate if you don’t get to live in a big white house? And guzzle champagne whenever you like and with whomsoever you like? Got to have some compensation for ordering all those hits.

And who do think gets the real perks? The $10,000 bottles? The $100,000 suites? The oligarchs, BRH – and they aren’t even pretending to do any good – just plotting to rip off whatever you have left. And quite openly too.

Mr. Kunstler accurately describes many aspects of the devolution of our society. Where he and I part company, however, is his assessment of the newly emergent social justice movements somewhat reminiscent of the 60s; especially Black Lives Matter.

To me, the stand being taken by black Americans against the vile police conduct we see in an endless stream of videos (thanks to cell phone cameras), violence that apparently has always been there but has now become more visible, is a POSITIVE step.

Hopefully, it will inspire or encourage similar social movements, focused on a variety of crucial issues, in which marginalized people (increasingly most of us) stand up to and openly confront an oppressive American empire totally out of control.

I don’t. I thought I made that clear. I suppose you mean white folks as in the police. They have a point there as the police are out of control. But so are they. And when Whites get gunned down the media says as little as possible.

An Idaho rancher, popular and a pillar of his community, was informed that one of his bulls had been hit by a car and was threatening people. He rushed out to the road to put the animal down. Unfortunately the Sheriff’s men were already there – and somehow or why gunned him down. You’d think cops in that part of the country wouldn’t freak out at the sight of a civilian with a gun, but there ya go. It’s gotten a lot of attention out here at least, but no one really believes anything is going to happen to these goobers.

James; Why are you such a champion of Vladimir Putin? He’s a bully, a warmonger, and a murderer. “Our campaign to destabilize Ukraine..”? What campaign? You are the only person I’ve ever read that says there was one. What is your defense of Putin’s invasion and current occupation of part of Georgia? I know people from there who have told me that destabilization is precisely the strategy the Russians have used there. Goon squads mingle among lower class Russian speaking people and give them money to stir up trouble, start demonstrations, and provoke the authorities. I guess you thought the Russians were provoked into invading Afghanistan in 1979, and Putin was justified in murdering journalists who dared write the truth about him.
Turkey was completely justified in shooting down the Russian plane who violated their airspace. They only acted after repeated violations and repeated warnings. I think Putin got the message, and I hope other countries who have seen such incursions do the same thing.

Absolutely agree with you on Ukraine. Victoria Nuland has her fingerprints all over the place on that one. Even the commercial airliner shoot-down was likely a setup to frame Putin. Just look at a map. NATO has encroached to within a couple hundred miles of Moscow. Putin is a student of history–especially Russian/European. Vulnerability on their western border has always spelled disaster. Putin has shown remarkable restraint given all the meddling by the U.S. If the tables were turned, and it was Putin & friends in our backyard, WWWIII would be well underway. It might even be over.

Well , Putin’s predecessors were in our back yard. Have you ever heard of the Cuban Missile Crisis? The idea that Putin is somehow a victim or acting defensively is absurd. How do you justify his grabbing part of Georgia? Were they threatening him? Did Russia’s feeling of vulnerability on their western border somehow justified their occupation of eastern Europe for 45 years? How do you account for Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan in the 1970s?

Why don’t you (or James) be specific? What information? What news stories? The facts are, it is Russian troops that are in Eastern Ukraine, Crimea, and parts of Georgia, not U.S. troops. Why would the U.S. want to create chaos there?

I think Putin will soon be sending messages of his own, and Turkey and NATO might not like what they say. Today in the WSJ, General Scales, USMC, says watch out for Russia to move on the Baltic Countries in the near future, and take them relatively easily.

Once the word hits The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN that Erdogan has been buying oil from Daesh and propping up the most hated terrorist organization on the planet, there won’t be enough paper towels on Earth to get that egg off Obama’s face.

Russia may be the only hope for Eastern Europe against the West’s desire to turn the whole continent into a Muslim slum. Already protestors in East Germany have beseeched Lord Vlad to save them. Face the facts: the time of the Strong Man is back. Fascism didn’t fail, it was never tried. Democracy? It failed us as it failed the Ancient Greeks.

Unless we get a global network of authoritarian regimes, and soon, near term extinction is all too likely. But not just any authoritarian regime will do, any more than any democracy will do. We need regimes which acknowledge the existence of an objective reality. These are now thin on the ground.

“The Story Line Dissolves” is a good way to put it. Why did the Soviet Empire disintegrate? Because the “Story Line” dissolved.

The promulgators of bullshit from Pravda and Izvestia never believed any of it, (especially them).

All those glorious production figures? Nobody believed them. How could there be such astounding numbers with the shops so empty?

Well, the heroic Soviet people had to support and subsidize people beyond their borders in the struggle against perfidious capitalists, treacherous Jews and who knows what other conspirators. But even that excuse, as plausible as it sounded, wore thin.

The Americans had foreign obligations similar to the Soviets in their occupation of western Europe and Japan and Korea. It’s not as if people behind the Iron Curtain weren’t aware of the disparity of results between East and West. West Germans drove snappy new cars, ate good food, lived in nice apartments. Same with the French and others. But what about East Germans? What about the Poles?

Everyone under the boot of the communists knew the truth of it, only the most rock-headed reality-denying apparatchiks denied the reality. But hidden disbelief on the street morphed into open disbelief and open defiance.

Reality-deniers in modern day Washington and Wall Street and the Fed should take the example. Reality-denying doesn’t work.

American statistical agencies should especially take the example. Nobody believes their bullshit. Some people with an interest in maintaining their power and privilege, may ACT as if they believe, but none of them really does, not even them.

Discussed a different optique on the “collapse of the Soviet Union” in Montreal circa 1995 with three very smart chaps: a physician from Prague; a nuclear chemist from the ex-Soviet Union; and a computer scientist from China.

All agreed that it was the totalitarian aspect of the system that people hated, not so much the “communism.”

After much discussion and (and also too much vodka and beer) over the course of a summer, the consensus was that Gorbachev dissolved the Soviet empire as a response to the demographic reality of the Islamization of the Soviet Union from the republics that had majority Muslim populations.

As a PU alum I am surprised to agree with the “revolting” students. Demote Wilson for going into WW I, starting a draft, imprisoning war resisters,adding to the role of government( the Fed), in addition to being an over the top racist. He seems to be an example of Presidency attracting sociopaths.

In general we need to worship personalities less, reduce the size of the Lincoln Memorial, and hire someone to constantly whisper in the ear of presidents ” you might be an asshat”.

Not a bad summary bogwood. The Cognitive Dissonance I observed with lovers of Thomas Jefferson on finding out he owned slaves was very entertaining. But, I don’t think at this point rehashing what happened in the distant past is going to help us much in the near future.

And of course that’s all that matter. Blacks and how they are treated is the ultimate test of every nation and every one. Of course they don’t hold themselves to any similar standard, but you’re not interested in that. Sacred Cows aren’t supposed to talk anyway.

That’s the funny thing; by allowing the ‘Federal’ ‘Reserve’ (it is neither) to happen, he gave Big Finance a permanent seat at Big Government’s table – without being part of it. They are “independent” and immune to inquiry – even to being audited by the GAO apparently.

And Martin Luther King as a sex addict, communist, and plagiarizer. As long as you’re fair, you have a valid point. Surely you’re not going to just bash the Dead White Males and the Living Ones too as Dr Ignatiev desired?

I am here to wish JHK good health, may he live much longer to see how wrong he is.

There will not be a world made by hand unless robotic hands that is.
I too believed in the peak oil hysteria.
I fell for ASPO (you know what I mean) and so apparently did JHK.
But now it turns out there is more oil the expected – too much to burn it seems.
I believed in ASPO since after all twas composed of retired oil field geologists now free to speak the truth.
But maybe we should not trust old men, who seeing as how their end approaches, delight in tales wherein all else must perish along with them.
I like this highly entertaining blog. How often have we been promised the imminent demise of the world financial system?
Was this not imprudent?
Mankind can endure more than is here believed. The future will go on without us. We should admit as much without bitterness.

Too much/too little oil is not the only route to a world made by hand. Might I recommend “The Fourth Turning” by Strauss & Howe as one of a variety of plausible scenarios that get us there. You’ll find it easier to read if you remove your rose-colored glasses. -Sticks

P.S. If it’s fiction and entertainment you’re after, there are better places than this on the web.

Hmmm… we will see about how, exactly, peak oil plays out. Conventional petroleum production did, after all, peak as predicted.

Frequently noted, on The Oil Drum, in years past, was the prediction that the economy would not be able to sustain $100 + oil – or even $90 oil. When the economy tanks (as it has, notwithstanding the cries to the contrary by government “economists” and “statisticians”), the consequential overproduction from trying to keep up pretenses will eventually cause deflation. This is how depressions evolve from recessions.

The extent to which the Fed, and most all other national reserve banks, by whatever name known, have pumped money to try to create inflation, in their scheme to renounce all national debt, is an indication of reality. As is their abject failure to accomplish their aim.

Too much oil to burn? Well, in a way that is true since we cannot afford to burn it as it turns out. But, not more than expected? I don’t think so.

I doubt that any of these factors will be the cause of the ultimate demise of the world financial system though. At the most we should expect a decline. The question is degree and temporal extent. I for one hope you are closer to truth than your straw man.

Man cannot admit that he’s not the end product but only a twig on a branch of the evolutionary tree. The problem is the fact that man is bound to the future; it’s humanity’s burden. First step is realizing that the advancement of time does not equate to progress. Linear time mapping in the human brain is a real impediment and why we are destined for the failed species graveyard. Move over homo habilis… the universe wants its own eyes, ears, and hands, but not ours, it’s a slow work in progress.

You doubtless believe in markets. So does a highly expert blogger known as Gail the Actuary, who predicted many years ago that Peak Oil would manifest as price spikes followed by price collapse.

So, a thoroughly classical analysis leads to the phenomenon that we are observing, all based on Peak Oil.

But I don’t believe in markets. I think that the “markets” are nothing more than rigged games played by monopolists, speculators, and little guys trying not to get squished. For heaven sakes, man, the markets are open to nations – who print as many billions as they wish, whenever they wish, for any reason, or for no reason – and that, I think, means that price discovery is impossible. And without price discovery there is nothing resembling a classical “market”.

And without a functioning market system, there is no such thing as a stable price. Today’s commodity prices could fluctuate into the stratosphere tomorrow, and, I expect will. As soon as the low prices have accomplished their purpose.

Another thing. In the 1980’s price bust, there was 15% spare capacity over demand. Now it’s about 1% and dropping. Fracked wells lose capacity real fast.

And yet another thing. Every major player has something to gain from low oil prices:
OPEC – break the fracking crowd and cripple the oil majors
Russia – stress and possibly destabilize western finances through derivatives
US – hurt Russia’s economy through balance of payments
China – gets to keep its oil in the ground

So the question is, who is playing chess and who is playing poker? The question is not about Peak Oil.

Perhaps this is a good place to interject my periodic rant about race and color. First of all, there is one race, and that is human; an adjective describing a member of species Homo Sapiens sapiens.

There are 1 in 17,000 members of this species that are “white”, and these are called albinos. All remaining members of the human race are varied in color from very light to very dark, and what color their skin is depends on where they live and./or how long ago their ancestors moved from Africa or other equatorial regions where darker skin is needed as a protection from greater exposure to sunlight outwards to regions where, in order to create vitamin D from sunlight, eyes blue eyes confer a genetic benefit, and there is not as much need to protect the skin.

Albinism is considered a genetic defect, naturally occurring however.

Self description as white or black is contradictory to reality, and the distinction is generally inflicted on us by the uber-wealthy as a means to control the rest of the species who, if not fighting each other and fearful of one another might notice.

Better yet, jettison the hackneyed illuminati 1% conspiracies and come to the realization that the entire human species has an equal propensity for sucking. Anything else is contradictory to reality and the distinction is generally inflicted upon us by ourselves as a means to quell cognitive dissonance… we all want an enemy, it’s just not “them”, it’s you. Life on this planet does not need a return to a world made by hand, it needs a return to a world absent the hand.

So why are all or nearly all the Track records held by Blacks? And all the real Nobel Prizes held by Whites, Jews, or Northeast Asians?

Why do Wolves and Dogs act so different – even though they can produce viable offspring and thus are the same species? Thus they are classified as two species even though one – a clear example of the power of breed, race, or sub-species.

Absolutely. But these yapping lap dogs known as liberals expect a bull dog to run like a greyhound and a greyhound to fit in their purse like a Paris Hilton’s toy poodle. One time it got trapped in her boot for two days. She was frantic. Luckily she found it. (maybe when she went to put on her boot?) It was ok just thirsty.

THIS WEEK’s installment is an itemized assessment of Collapse phenomenon – a good place to bring CFN’s continual conversation back to. For instance;

“I doubt that I’m I alone in worrying that America today is losing its collective mind.”-JHK.

And I doubt that Americans are alone in worrying about America losing its mind. Our financialized Empire of Fake stands a astride the Atlantic: one foot planted in Wall Street and the other in The City of London. When that goes, so do the infinitely fine and all too frail ‘arrangements’ of the world’s central bank community. The tangible economy has bled-out & in the flat-lining stage. Fake is all we have left.

“The net effect is that Vladimir Putin ended up looking more rational and sane than any leader in the NATO coalition.”-JHK.

That is a blunt way to put it, but also the plain truth. Russia underwent a partial systemic Collapse (down to Level Three) and managed to brake their descent. In the process the Russian power elite learned and internalized something critical: That They Could Lose It All – IF they didn’t pull their heads out of their collective 4th-Point of Contact, start observing the world AS IT IS, not as they wished it would be, and proceed accordingly every minute of every working day.

Every Russian move of strategic importance from the late 90’s forward has been executed in that spirit. In other words, they’ve been playing the game like winners, not yesterday’s spoiled champ swaggering up to his ‘Reckoning Day’.

I say these not as a ‘Russophile’ but as an experienced and well-trained observer of The Big Picture. The facts are what they are.

“The phenomenon of demented lone gunmen killing strangers and innocents will morph into civil insurrection, especially as the major political parties break apart and the loosed factions set out to settle their old scores by whatever means they can.”-JHK.

This is fine way to nutshell violent American mass-casualty incidents. Mark Ames in his well-written and apparently under-read book makes a number fine points about ‘Going Postal’ phenomena; that they increase with societal stress – particularly economic – and that the first ‘sparks’ of the flames to come are society’s unstable individuals. JHK is thoroughly correct about ‘lone gunman’: they are harbingers.

These insolent children of identity politics on one hand and the destabilizing effect of an overt and covert military/commercial/financial empire are two sides of the same coin. When a cabal decides to concentrate on one world reserve currency and abuse the $printing presses, then the wealth pump flows their way. The budget deficits were used to build an empire. The flip side is that the power so concentrated has had no concerns other than their aspirations of world wide conquest. The responsibility inherent in that position of power includes the investment in the physical and social fabric if a nation. So the base interests of profiteering off of advertising to children, selling wanton sex and violence to adolescents in the entertainment and gaming industries, and the promotion of poor purchasing decisions in the place of personal accomplishment fills the vacuum. Add our society’s stewards’ decision to roll back important restrictions on the ability of the professions to advertise, such that we have been inundated with misinformation and manipulation from both ambulance chasers to pharmaceutical companies– all promising something for nothing.

So we dumb down one generation from birth and then roll back the academic standards to accommodate the result. About every 15 years another hard-earned civilizational peg is removed from the social structure. We can have an empire for nothing. We can have cheap consumer widgets without having to manufacture anything. We can have big Wall Street gains without doing anything but reshuffling the deck faster and faster. We can have a pain free life and good health by popping a few pills. And we will all have a joyous future if we were only to have enough faith in technology.

Is it any wonder that children of ALL classes develop a sense of entitlement? Is it any wonder that those who sense the phoniness if it (without necessarily understanding that’s what they’re seeing) develop depression?

It’s the unravelling if an empire.

I believe the economic collapse of the empire has begun so the world wide destabilization campaign has hit the “go” stage. All to precipitate a world war they fully intend to win. Those debts and deficits are to be paid with the blood, gold, and resources of vanquished nations. And since I believe that the US Citizen is now a client of this military/ financial empire, we are to be rendered as well. Extorted from us will be our viable public infrastructure and our national public lands.

But at least this infantile and asinine sense of entitlement will be knocked out! The whole thing will be the national social Reset Button.

So maybe Frank Gehry is memorializing the current moment in history more effectively than anyone else. At least that’s ONE explanation for this work!

MD and Terry David,
Thanks very much for your incisive comments. It’s very refreshing to see some actual focus and critical thinking! (That has become all too rare around these parts.)
Adaptation and survival favor the informed generalist.

I, too, spent three years at the Air Farce base up on the hill. September 1961 through September 1964. – Pogo

==============

Well I’ll be go-to-hell !!

I arrived at the base in July 1962 (a brown bar fresh out of ‘rot-cee’). I got an “early-out” effective 4/15/65. Around the middle of this brief career I became the base Accounting and Finance Officer. My name would have appeared in the signature block of your pay check. My off-base hangouts were a couple of poolrooms downtown and the Kazbar for wine, women and song.

The Finance building where I plied my trade was directly across the street from the SAGE building.

Yes, I was there during the Cuban Missile Crisis. We spent many hours “on alert” during which time I would jokingly sit at my desk protectively hugging the gizmo that fit on to the check signing machine called the signature head.

Until I moved off base with a couple of other lieutenants I lived in the BOQ.

Did you get to see JFK when he arrived at the base in Sept 1963, less than two months before he was shot? I stood along a chain link fence as he walked by a mere few feet away.

Well hot-damn Q. Shtik! It would be a true pleasure to meet up with you and swap some old stories. Sorry to be so late getting back but I looked and looked in all the wrong places and made one last attempt by searching for “Pogo” and finally got a hit tonight. Perseverance pays off (sometimes).

As to your question: No, I was “reared up” in Memphis, Tennessee, was going to Memphis State U. in 59-60, read “The Catcher in the Rye” (which JHK’s youth reminds me of), got all discombobulated, broke (there were few student loans in those days, thank Gawd), didn’t know what the hell to major in, etc., so decided to join the Air Farce to give me four years to dwell on those vexing questions of life, and, in addition, what to do with my life thereafter. Answer: still don’t know. And as we all know, it gets a little difficult to live with parents when you are 18.

Before discharge on 01Sept64, I had been accepted for a job as a “Customer Engineer” with a new, hot-shot computer company in Minneapolis called Control Data. The VP of design was a guy you might of heard of named Seymour Cray. I love that name because Seymour Glass was a character in J. D. Salinger stories. Anyway, I morphed from installing and servicing computers (when they would fill a small house) into computer programming, went freelance for about 20 years or so. Worked on lots of interesting projects over the years, including several government projects like the test and evaluation of the UYK-47 Naval Shipboard computer system developed by Unysis. Most of my programming years were on more mundane applications, like payroll etc but lots of assembly language software engineering work like COBOL compilers, I/O drivers, etc. Had lots of good times but somehow did not end up rich. Like George HW Bush said, I just didn’t have “that vision thing”. Having worked on computers with core memory when 32k 24-bit words was a lot, I could not envision going to Walgreens and buying a memory stick with 16 Giga fucking bytes for only $3.98!!

Except for a few sojourns to Florida and California (what is now Silicon Valley) we have lived around the Minneapolis area. I now live in Apple Valley, about 15 or 20 miles south of MSP airport.

So you were the “paymaster”, huh? Well, you did a fine job as no checks ever bounced, haha. I remember a retired Lt. Col. who sold life insurance to the GI’s for NY LIfe. Maybe you knew him. He was also one of the founders of the bank located on the base, if I recall.

Speaking of payroll, when I first got there in 1961, we did not get checks but queued up to be paid in cash in the big hanger on the flight line. Occasionally, we got paid in $2 bills (remember those?) so the USAF could demonstrate the economic impact of the 2000 or so men and officers (well, officers are men too…I mean enlisted men + officers of course) that were stationed at the Air Farce Patch. Most of those $2 bills probably ended up in the till of the various bars and taverns in Duluth and Superior, WI. Maybe even in the till of the Madam and proprietor of 316 John Street in Superior, haha. The name John Street was most appropriate. Even John Steinbeck might not think that one up for Cannery Row! I heard that 316 John Street was a real whore house back in Denver even before I got to Duluth.

Q. Shtik, if you ever saw the movie “No Time for Sargents” and had a laugh or two, then I have a few tales about those days that might improve on that fictional movie.

For example: I was cross-trained to load the real weapons on the two “hot birds” that were on alert at all times, ready to go. Included in the mix were two radar missiles, two IR missiles and a rocket with a nuclear warhead of about 15 to 20 kiloton yield. One time, a loader from my electronic shop (who was not on my loading team) took out his Phillips screwdriver and starter taking screws out of the damn A-bomb! So what would you guess happen to him? Well, he got busted one grade in rank and was sent over to the SAGE building to be a “scope dope” for the rest of his enlistment! Some punishment, huh? Nice, warm indoor job.

Did you happen to know a 1st Lt. Christo? I believe he was from Massachusetts.

One final comment and I shall say goodnight:
Did you know that the F-106 Interceptor stills holds the world speed record for a single-engine, single pilot aircraft?? It was one hot aircraft and had Mach 2+ on the speedometer.

I hope you get back to this post and see my reply. We need to figure out how to go “off line” and not mess up this forum. Any ideas?

I was working the weekend shift and the 30th ADF decided to test our “mission readiness” out on the wild frontiers at Duluth, Minnesota. So they sent a Martin B-57 Canberra, which was a design failure of an aircraft (not a good bomber) with the bomb-bay loaded up with electronic counter-measure stuff.

So the B-57 had a flame-out (which is really bad stuff for a jet engine, and even worse when both jets flame out) and managed to somehow limp to Duluth base. The pilots were magnificent since the B-57 had the glide slope of a rock.

The pilot and weapons officer guy, got the thing down with a wheels up landing (no jet power, no hydraulic pressure to get the fucking wheels down), slid down the runway, popped the canopy and bounded out, kissed their ass first and then the ground. It was beauty in motion and I watch it all from the flight line fence.

Our base fire department guys were on the scene, sprayed foam all over the B-57 and stepped back to a jolly-well-good- job-done round of back-patting.

Then a wisp of smoke appeared! But they had sprayed ALL the foam on the B-57 so had none left in the firetruck! So they hauled ass back to the fire station to mix up some more foam (which meant 5 gal buckets of gunk mixed with water I think). Takes a long time. So by the time they got back to the runway, the B-57 was a total loss. Too bad for our base and the taxpayers.

Well, anyway, the story made the back cover of the “Air Force Safety” magazine in a 4-photo spread as an example of “I can’t believe these dumb fucks in Duluth”.

And then there was the weekend went a pilot did a snap roll on final approach, causing the auxiliary fuel tank to break loose and nearly crash into the barracks. What fun. They did manage to sent an auxiliary fuel tank into chow hall of the radar site up at Finland, Minnesota. Luckily, the chow hall was empty.

Yes, what I remember about JFK’s visit to Duluth a few months before his assassination, is that a fuel truck full of JP-4 was parked out on the flight line for several weeks, maybe even a month, before JFK arrived. It was guarded by AP’s 24/7.

About the Turks shooting down an intruding Russian bomber – it seems that the Turks may have violated Greek airspace 2000 times with military aircraft in the last year alone. If true, that puts an interesting spin on the hysterical Turkish reaction to the Russians. It also begs the question of who to believe.

John D. Rockefeller, Sr. and his wife largely hid their wealth from their children in their formative years. The kids wore hand-me-down clothes and shared a tricycle. He paid his kids to do household chores. They did not have servants.

Well, it turns out that 79 year old man beaten into a coma last night on the streets of New Haven by 5 ‘Youts on bikes’, “walking home from work”, was a Distinguished Yale Professor, yet un identified, and the assault occurred just off campus, in front of his house. Pity thes poor prfessors, terrified of saying the wrong thing at lecture, or assigning the wrong book, pissing off Maoists who try to get you fired (tenure isn’t gonna save you) and getting beaten by 5 ‘Youts on Bikes’ who dint do nuffins, at 79 years old, within an inch of your life.

There used to be a popular American TV show called “Cops”, which basically involved white urban policemen chasing young black men and wrestling them to the ground. The theme song for the TV show was a pseudo-reggae tune called “Bad Boys”, like “Boyz in the Hood”.

Janos, I never had a chance to reply to your previous post, so I’ll take the chance here.

——————————
Janos Skorenzy November 28, 2015 at 12:47 am

“I never said that. Like most White Nationalists, I accept that East Asians and Ashkenazi Jews have higher average IQs. So how are we supremacists? I support Whites because I am White. I’m for myself. I will my life, both singular and collectively. That goes right under your radar, doesn’t it. But it hits home for lots of people – just like a cruise missile. We are going to win. Hope you can humble yourself enough to get it at some point because you seem like a good person, certainly more polite than the usual Liberal (and even Conservatives are Liberals now). You idealism is the enemy – not just ours but even of your own life.

Equality? Where? Show me some. I’ve never seen “Man” but only a Frenchman, an American, a White, a Black, etc. Equality is a valuable abstraction for mathematics and law. But assuming it is a huge Fail and trying to impose it is the Procrustean Bed. It’s Communism lite, now getting heavier, right? You have the right to your own meta-physical assumptions and religion. You don’t have the right to impose it on the rest of us.”
——————————

Well, idealism is in many ways the stuff of life. Without idealism what are we left with? Nihilism? Fatalism? Defeatism? Consumerism? The stuff plaguing a nation of hedonistic, materialist atheists. Men need something higher to believe in. I imagine you strongly believe in that. Without it, something rots inside of us. You say that you are a White Nationalist. You’ve written before about your admiration for National Socialism. National Socialism was a highly romantic movement. It was incredibly idealistic. Would you not agree with that? So, I would say it is not idealism itself that is flawed, but rather individual ideologies. Certainly not all ideologies are equal nor valid.

I hope that I am never forcing my beliefs on anyone. Do I argue, sometimes emphatically, for what I believe? Certainly. As do you. And many others here. Do we succeed in changing any minds? Often not, but sometimes a seed is planted and it may grow into full blossom in time. It is the way of a free society.

I wouldn’t argue at all that equality is inherent in life. Far from it. Some are more intelligent that others. Some are physically stronger than others. Some are born into a life of privilege and others into poverty. No, inequality is the norm. This is true within the races as well. When I speak of equality, I speak of law. I speak of citizenship. These are not inherent in nature. It is uniquely human. So, they are not slaves to nature either. Are the races equal? Perhaps not. As you said the Ashkenazi Jews have the highest median IQ of any other races, for one example. That doesn’t mean that we have to accept this inequality in the areas of law and citizenship. And I believe we should not.

Well I can’t disagree with you agreeing with me. And yes, I said your idealism, not all idealism, certainly not mine. Of course the problem still remains: the White Race is being killed off. What do we do about it? Nothing is not an option. The Status Quo is doing nothing.

Mixed race empires have no futures. Nor do mixed race nations. They powers that be intend to miscegenate every White country out of existence. A bold and demonic plan I must admit. They deserve no mercy.

Totality off topic, but pertaining to last weeks CFN Blog, University is a waste of time and money. I spent 5 years on the road after High School. Chucking chain as a worm in the oil patch of WY, Hoisting cable for the chair rigs in CO at 12,000 ft.,. laying miles of pipe in TX, building pump ants in LA, etc. I’m surprised I still have all my digits ( I can still count to ten). Not like some of my co-workers. This shit you don’t learn in college. After that it was 33 years as a FF/EMT. The new guys on the job came from HS to College and then the FD and don’t know shit. Many of them can’t even drive a standard trans. The trucks I drove needed to be double clutched. The youths today are clueless. We are so screwed. Granted there are many handy guys and gals out there, but it is certainly not on par compared to years past.

But could you design these systems? Or the medical equipment you used? You are a perfect representative of your class – no more, no less. You guys always focus on driving standard as your standard of moral worth. Utterly bizarre. Can you drive a space ship or a jet? Or just an airplane? No? What’s wrong with you?

Remember, handy guys and gals handed our country away to hostile elites, both native and alien. And went to fight their wars thousands of miles away, often eagerly.

Actually Vlad, I can fly a plane, prop job anyway, I could probably fix it also, engine anyways, maybe not the electronics. I’d have a go at a jet if someone would loan me one!, Spaceships pretty much fly themselves. All you need is an I-Phone with 100 times the computing power of the lunar lander in ’69. You have too give credit to Armstrong, Nerves of steel, landed that sumbitch’ with seconds of fuel left in the tank!

John D. Rockefeller, Sr. and his wife largely hid their wealth from their children in their formative years. The kids wore hand-me-down clothes and shared a tricycle. He paid his kids to do household chores. They did not have servants.

I don’t usually comment, but thank you so much for your thoughtful essays, JHK. Your blog and books never fail to make me think more deeply about our most important and timely issues. Your writing has made me a better, more thoughtful and informed person.
However, your response section has, once again, become unbearable. On some blogs the comments are often the most interesting part. Perhaps it’s time to flush the toilet or follow the examples of Paul Craig Roberts and George Monbiot and not let your ideas be vulgarized by the chat room.

Yes, many Media sites and blogs have deep sixed their comments section. They don’t want to hear from the hoi polloi anymore. Democracy in action. They are in the process of electing new peoples to replace Whites – Mestizos, East and South Asians, and of course Muslims from everywhere but particularly Syria.

You really a special person. Are you sure you are loving yourself the way you deserve to be loved?

I usually read every comment. YOU are the only one here complaining…Hold on a minute…We just voted. We decided to flush YOU. Democracy’s a bitch! Hopefully, we won’t need to use the plunger too. I have my doubts.

Yes, the Good Little Maoists won’t agree with him but they don’t want to fall out with him either, so they go on talking around in circles, discharging billows of rhetoric. Yes, they say, yes, so much is wrong and JFK is a wonderful one-man demolition job, but that doesn’t include, well, you know what.

So you want to censor the mealy mouthed. Let them come out and say what they mean!

Robotics will drive space exploration. Huge market for robots—space exploration and war. It won’t Collapse. Infinite resources in space if limits can be overcome. It just needs “Beings” that can live and work in Space.

“And his restraint this week following what may have been a US-assisted shoot-down of a Russian bomber by idiots in Turkey is really estimable.” – JHK

I think we are rushing to wrong conclusions here. If we look at the net results of the episode with the downed Russian SU-24, we’ll see:

1. Strengthening of Obama’s position in Syria through Kurdish opposition achieved with relatively small expenditure of resources: just 50 or so US Special Forces entering the Kurdish-held areas, but Obama gets a blocking stake (with Putin consent?) in the whole Syrian affair

2. Significant strengthening of Russian position in Syria with doubling of Russian military presence – new air base, C-400 no-fly zone over entire Syria and significant part of Turkey, possible introduction of Russian ground forces with regiment of Spetsnaz GRU.

Net losers – Turkish hawks/DAESH (and probably US Party of War behind them)

If that SU-24 was shot down over Turkish territory, we would’ve seen a completely different picture. But something went wrong, may be just like the episode with a downed Malaysian Boeing MH17 shot down a year ago over Eastern Ukraine.

Our OS is culture.
(Culture has the same relationship to our brains as an OS to a CPU. It is so simple but also so difficult to change.)

For our future and also for the potential solutions read E.T. Hall: Beyond Culture..

Our politicians and academics did not read it or could not understand.
Homo sapiens was once successful to out-reproduce the Neanderthaler in Europe which had 50% larger brain but could not reproduce so well under ice age conditions… so now we will see if HS can outperform himself as well. Just look at the flow of immigrants from the near east and you will see the old answer, with an uncertain outcome.

According to Hall the times ahead will be about tail-baiting and loss of intelligence in every aspects. Our territory is now more limited than during the ice age, but this will be the hot plate (global warming) version at this time as a challenge, combined with some thirst and not just for oil. The war industry is producing the means for a long time to fight it out. Look for some bunkers in a safe distance..

The original design of the organizers of 2008 crisis (certain wing of financial oligarchy) was to open the FED floodgate, use freshly minted dollars to buy up as many assets around the world as time would allow and then leave American people with imploded financial system.

At a meeting on climate in Paris Barack Obama held talks with Vladimir Putin. That has become their third summit in a few weeks, from the end of September.

Previous conversation took place during G20 in Antalya, Turkey a couple of weeks ago. And a little earlier they had major talks in New York during the celebrations of the 70th anniversary of the United Nations.

Note that before the New York talks, the United States and Russia have not met for a long time.

The natural world is doomed by the proliferation of humans…..now 4 times the carrying capacity of the planet. To wit, the filthy japs are back to murdering whales and dolphins…..for what reason? It is illegal and grossly immoral. Shame on all you traitorous creeps for driving toyotas, nissans, buying anything jap. On the water, we see grays and orcas less often every year in this area. Where is Truman and another Fat Boy now that we need him?

VICTORIA – The Class of 2015 — four orcas born since late December — is thriving in the waters of B.C. and Washington state.

All are part of the southern resident orca population, which includes the J, K and L pods. Southern resident orcas are listed as endangered, with pollution and lack of food among the contributing factors.

“We hadn’t had a successful birth in about three years,” said Michael Harris, executive director of the Pacific Whale Watch Association. “You’ve got four whales now within a population of 81 [southern residents] that are under a year old.

“I think we’re all cautiously optimistic.”

Members of the association, which represents 34 whale-watching operators in the United States and Canada, came up with the Class of 2015 label, he said.

“We need new, younger people to come into the economy to contribute, to set up businesses, employ other Nova Scotians and expand our tax base rather than manage with a shrinking tax base,” he told CBC Nova Scotia.

“Many of today’s most successful business leaders were refugees from Lebanon, from the civil war in the ’60s and ’70s … [They] come into Nova Scotia, create wealth, create jobs, increase tax revenue. So what I’m excited about … is who in that class of refugees will be the next Nova Scotia success story for the next 30 years?”

Shayna Plaut, a research fellow at Simon Fraser University, makes a similar argument for northern British Columbia.

“Particularly with the refugees that are coming from Syria, you’re talking about predominantly middle class folks, professional folks,” she said. “And they’re coming to a new community and bringing with them those resources.”

One of the strongest economic arguments in favour of taking in refugees is that it worked the last time. Canada took in some 60,000 Vietnamese “boat people” starting in 1979, and research suggests they have been an economic success story.

According to Ryerson University professor Morton Beiser’s 1999 book “Strangers at the Gate,” the Vietnamese boat people arrived with little English or French, no assets and inappropriate job skills for Canada’s economy.

But within a decade of their arrival, the former boat people had an unemployment rate 2.3 percentage points lower than Canada as a whole, and relied less heavily on social assistance than the general population. One in five had started their own business.”

” We can have a pain free life and good health by popping a few pills. And we will all have a joyous future if we were only to have enough faith in technology.”

Regarding the first sentence, who exactly is making these claims– the pharmaceutical industry? Because when I watch the preponderance of pharma commercials, there is also quite a few “qualifiers” for those actually listening, such as side effects and the ubiquitous ‘this may not work for everyone’ disclaimer.

But for the people actually prescribing the pills–medical professionals– there has been a huge movement away from the idea that people can have health and a pain free life by popping pills. Indeed, ‘lifestyle’ choices are nearly always the first suggestion from the vast majority of physicians when possible and appropriate.

So I reject this particular claim as cliche doomer porn hyperbole and only accepted by people who lack critical thinking skills.

Your second sentence. Can you imagine the joy felt by the carpenter who formerly had to saw everything by laborious and tedious hand when first feeding a piece of wood through an electric powered planer, joiner, and table saw? Or the sheer joy of cutting out complex shapes like butter through a knife with a state of the art
scroll saw?

So yes, for most real professionals it was a joy indeed. For those inch-deep ‘by hand survivalists’ who seemingly take a vicious delight in the future prospect of denying technological alleviation to the suffering of their fellow man, well, yes they do relish their romantic delusions of days producing laborious hand made furniture for what and purchased by whom? For a bucket of exchanged potatoes? or a pair of shoes made by the shoe maker?

Or even more fatuous, a real critical thinker is supposed to embrace the prospect of physical pain because the ‘bare-foot doctor’ is hiking down the dirt road from miles away to save the day?

No wonder “Festus” loved your post. Because despite his incessant barbs that nearly everyone on this site lacks critical thinking skills, Oz himself rarely takes a hard look at his own belief system.

So much of this ‘by-hand’ romance reminds me of the tool collector who never actually uses the tools. Oh yes, they can tell you all about them: who made them, how they made them and in what year and country they were made. But when it actually comes to using the tool, well that’s an entirely different story: You’ll find no wood chips residing under the hard to sweep areas in their “workshop”. Their spotless shops reveal the pristine stench of the vicarious fraud/charlatan; the ‘by hand’ survivalist tilling a little soil for an hour or two before returning to the reality of their bread and butter office computer in the hay-making hours.

I agree with your take on Ozone. The best way to heat is passive solar in an adobe or straw-bale house that holds heat. Can you imagine if everyone heated by burning wood?

“Many people think that wood burning is better than other kinds of heating because wood is a renewable resource. However, wood burning can have negative impacts on human health. Scientists have recently discovered that the pollutants in wood smoke, notably particulate matter, are harmful to human health.”

Well. That’s a real gasket blown over something taken out of context. Creative, though. Mine is a world of design/build, applying new technologies to older ones. It’s a soldering iron one day and pipe wrenches another and large combustion equipment on another. As such I don’t need faith in technology. It demonstrates its utility every day. Let it now be said loudly and clearly,
“Fear not! As I, for one, am not coming after anyone’s pills or scroll saw!”

Now, how anyone can take a poster’s viewpoint that a society shouldn’t plan poorly under the assumption that some indeterminate and as yet nonexistent technology will handily clean up its messes is the ideological equivalent of being a jealous vengeful Luddite is beyond me. Fatuous, even. Of course I don’t think in those terms so I don’t project it.

Maybe I’ll 3D print some wood chips for the scroll saw. Then I’ll get right down to inventing the edible battery for mobile tech and electric cars. Then all the nation’s current social and geopolitical turmoil will be cured! You don’t think so? Oh, ye of little faith. Sheesh.

It’s apparent that Buck is refuting the thrust of this blog (what Mr. Kunstler writes about each and every Monday and in his novels of future scenarios) and also the opinions and remedial actions of his podcast guests. Very clever dismissal-by-proxy.

(Btw, sneaky little fishing expedition, but sorry, bait not taken. You’re only guessing what people use for tools in their daily lives and why they use them. ….In other words, their relationship to technology and what they may be employing it for.)

Ps.
“So much of this ‘by-hand’ romance reminds me of the tool collector who never actually uses the tools. Oh yes, they can tell you all about them: who made them, how they made them and in what year and country they were made. But when it actually comes to using the tool, well that’s an entirely different story: You’ll find no wood chips residing under the hard to sweep areas in their “workshop”. Their spotless shops reveal the pristine stench of the vicarious fraud/charlatan; the ‘by hand’ survivalist tilling a little soil for an hour or two before returning to the reality of their bread and butter office computer in the hay-making hours.”

You’re reminded of this person are you? If you know of such a person, then you know some very well-heeled swells. (You write as if you’ve seen their shop; declaratively.) The rest of us common filth don’t waste money on tools we have no intention of ever using.

I wonder what your reaction will be when the world of the future refuses to conform to your wishes/expectations?

Unfortunately, we don’t live under a parliamentary system that recognizes smaller factions as legitimate parties, so we are sure to live through an era of political disorder. – JH Kunstler

I think there’s more than one wheel turning here, maybe a bunch of interlocking mechanisms.

Why is Washington so broken? Is it a matter of moneyed interests corrupting it for their own benefit? No doubt, there’s a lot of that.

Is it a matter of institutional plumbing? As Kunstler sez, with different governing arrangements, you might get a different political dynamic.

Or is Washington’s broken-ness simply a reflection of the country’s?

The national re-alignment to a Republican South and a Democrat North reflects simply the centuries old division (broken-ness) that culminated in the 1860s bloodbath. The North may have won militarily and kept the South subjugated, but at what price? Well, we see the bill being paid day-in and day-out in the country’s capitol.

Let’s say that Hillary wins. Never mind the unbearable superiority dances of coastal elites. All that will go away. Because the odds are that at least one of the legislative branches will be in opposition hands. And that likely WON’T quickly fade.

And if the Republicans hold the House and/or the Senate (and never mind 30 of fifty state governorships and a majority of state legislatures) nothing that President Clinton, as the de-facto leader of the Democratic Party, wants to get done, will get done. Pass legislation? She won’t be able to pass gas.

Same with any Republican legislative agenda. Hillary will be Washington’s Veto Corleone. Expect obstructionism everywhere, all the time. That’s the price of national unity.

I don’t buy the argument that changing demographics are for the Democrats, with Republicans reduced year-by-year to a dwindling pool of aging white racists and church-people. Does anyone else buy it? Or is it just another Washington-Democrat talking point designed to inflame and further garbage-ize political discourse?

For my part, I don’t see a natural alignment of Hispanic culture and values, no matter the particular country of origin, with that of the Democrats, dominated as the Democrats are by elite interests and values whether they’re on campus or Wall Street. For all the intellectual sneering about the irrational religiosity of the Republican base, the Democrats fail to notice that a lot of Hispanics themselves, with their own religiosity, could fit nicely inside that particular tent.

Do Hispanics, with their relative impoverishment, generally give a damn about Democrat pet causes like the plight of the gay and transgendered? I think that, by and large, Spanish-speaking moms and pops have more immediate concerns and whoever speaks directly to those worries will win their vote.

In short, the Democrats, as personified by their likely candidate, are presumptuous. And arrogant. That’s how you lose. That’s how she lost to a sweet-talking nobody with a nothing resume.

This is not a hypothetical question. The coalition already exists. The coalition that elected a Black president in 2008 and re-elected him in 2012. The demographics simply work in favor of the aggrandizement of the coalition. It is not a question of “buying it” … history has already spoken loudly. The Republican war on women, Blacks, immigrants, the attack on Planned Parenthood, obsession with Obamacare, Benghazi, tax cuts for the rich, etc. are just icing on the cake that further strengthens the winning Obama coalition. Republicans won’t be back in the White House for a long long time.

“If you look at President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and [Mr. Darling] and for that matter some of the more aggressive Washington neo-cons, they have consistently mis-perceived the threat of radical Islamic terrorism and have advocated military adventurism that has had the effect of benefiting radical Islamic terrorists.” –Ted Cruz

Or as Donald Rumsfeld said, our military is creating more terrorists than we are killing.

Argument? It’s a fact: Hispanics vote Democrat for the most part. Why? More benefits. If stupid Whites are willing to buy their votes, why they’ll accept. The Democrats give them more so they vote Democrat. Are you perhaps projecting some kind of your own complexity and idealism onto a very pragmatic people?

But yes: Hispanics are very conservative in their world view although hypocritical in practice. Therefore the Democrats reveal their incredible stupidity in wanting more of them in – unless the goal is just to destroy the Republicans, their own destruction being a minor issue. That’s what hatred does to people.

FACT: Hispanics voted for Democrats Barack Obama and Joe Biden over Republicans John McCain and Sarah Palin by a margin of more than two-to-one in the 2008 presidential election, 67% versus 31% … 9% of the electorate was Latino.

FACT: In 2012 Latno voters made up 10% of the electorate for the first time ever. Latinos are the fastest growing minority, making up 16% of the nation’s population. They voted for President Barack Obama over Republican Mitt Romney 71% to 27%.

I am so glad Republicans are allergic to FACTS. Latinos will never help Republicans elect a president. Latinos are not stupid; they know the position of the GOP on building walls and deporting Hispanic immigrants.

The Democrats have a voter coalition that is not going to be beat and demographics will even make their voter coalition stronger.

Of course, Republicans are doing a good job of building the voter coalition for democrats. Today Republicans are attacking Planned Parenthood, an organization that favors contraception and family planning. Latinos know pro-choice is the law of the land.

The New York Times editiorial board got it right about GOP anti-Hispanic racism:

“Before Donald Trump, Republican presidential candidates could deflect tough questions on immigration with vague promises to secure the border and oppose all “amnesty” for illegal immigrants.

Not anymore. Mr. Trump has offered a plan to “take back our country” from what he calls the rapist-murderer-job stealers being exported from Mexico. He is full of ideas. He would expel 11 million immigrants, and their families, and let only “the good ones” back in. He would restrict legal immigration, and impose a national job-verification system so that everyone, citizens too, would need federal permission to work. He would build a 2,000-mile border wall and force Mexicans to pay for it. He would replace the Constitution’s guarantee of citizenship by birth with citizenship by bloodline and pedigree, leaving it to politicians and bureaucrats to decide what to do with millions of stateless children. He would flood the country with immigration agents and– it almost goes without saying– dismantle the economy and shred America’s standing as an immigrant-welcoming nation.”

Donald Trump has been leading in Republican polls for months and could become the Republican nominee for president. If not Trump or Carson, Ted Cruz is starting to pull ahead in the polls, given his recent performance at debates. Hallelujah!

Dmitri Orlov developed a good working model of how societies collapse in a book called ‘The Five Stages of Collapse: Survivor’s Toolkit’ inspired by his experience with the partial collapse of Russia as a sovereign national entity.

In his collapse schema Stage 1 is Financial Collapse, 2) Commercial Collapse, 3) Political Collapse, 4) Social Collapse & Stage 5 is Cultural Collapse. Collapses can be arrested at any stage.

As Mr. Orlov explains it, Collapse all the way to the bottom is not inevitable assuming the appropriate actions are taken. The book is well reasoned, written, and utilizes intelligent case studies to illustrate each scenario. For instance; Iceland is used as the end-of-chapter case study for Financial Collapse. In their case appropriate action was taken and systemic financial damage was repaired at the local/national level.

brh, do you support Obama’s decision today to send troops to Iraq? You think war might just be the answer? After years of war and the loss of thousands of US soldiers in the middle east, you think 2015 is different, a good time to put boots on the ground again? Does Obama know what he is doing?

Dear Mr. Kunstler
I usually enjoy your commentaries. However, I am perplexed at your support of Vladimir Putin. Regardless of the fantasies of restoring “lost empire” that dance in his head, he has violated international law with his seizure of Crimea which legally and geographically belongs to Ukraine, the nation which historically gave birth to Russia. Sometimes a parent has to cut loose a recalcitrant child when it constantly seeks to undermine that relationship.We won’t even talk about the illegal fomenting of revolution in other Ukrainian jurisdictions.
No, Mr. Kunstler, Vladimir Putin is not a rational voice for stability in this world, but rather, a destabilizer. He is the last thing we need at this crucial time.
Please continue to write your otherwise insightful analyses.
AM

Dr. Maya, I agree with your position and disagree with the Putin-friendly commentary on CFN, for the following reasons:

1) The Russian government has banned “gay propaganda” with a sweeping law that essentially criminalizes homosexuality while ordinary Russians are routinely harassed for their sexual orientation.

2) Vladimir Putin’s Russia prefers to pretend that AIDS doesn’t exist, despite the fact that the deadly disease is rising dramatically in Russia and throughout Central Asia and Eastern Europe. A new HIV strain is spreading rapidly in Russia, posing a threat to global health. While working to suppress the huge numbers of AIDS-related deaths in Russia, the Kremlin is blaming the United States for the epidemic rather than working to fix it.

3) President Putin is presiding over one of the more corrupt regimes on the planet. Laws are routinely ignored or used to enrich a select few at the expense of the many. Bribery and pay-to-play are rampant. Political officials use the courts to intimidate and remove economic competition to their own fortunes.

4) Putin’s regime has maintained harsh restrictions on the rights of women. Putin accused members of the punk band Pussy Riot of attacking “the moral foundations of our society” and a Russian court sentenced them to prison. The women have been exposed to harsh abuses and inhumane treatments.

5) The Pussy Riot arrests are just one example in a long line of crackdowns on dissent in Putin’s Russia. Opposition activists are routinely jailed or persecuted through government intimidation. Freedom of expression in Russia is increasingly becoming a rare luxury.

6) Under Putin’s reign, Russia has invaded the nation of Georgia, has maintained a long war in Chechnya, and has been heavily arming Bashar Al-Assad in his war against the Syrian rebels. Regime critics around the world have also been dying under mysterious circumstances.

7) Putin — famous for wandering around bare-chested, cuddling with animals, and showing off talents as various as flying with cranes and hunting — encourages a cult of superficiality.

You don’t believe that a society needs moral foundations? Or you just don’t think Christianity provides that and therefore they have no rights if moral giants like Pussy Riot want to disrupt their services?

To me, the video of Cossacks whipping those Illuminati whores is one of the sweetest on the internet.

Russia is a culture descended from Swedish Vikings. They like their leaders virile. Putin is another Rurik or Rollo. Viking Chiefs used to jump from oar to oar when the ships were returning to port after a season of raiding.

Official estimates vary, but Russia’s Interfax news agency quotes the country’s Federal Center on AIDS, saying 986,657 Russians were HIV-positive as of November 23, 2015. Of these, 73,777 are new infections acquired so far this year, an increase of 12 percent over the same period last year. At the current rate, Russia will declare 1 million HIV infections before the end of the year.

It’s not “Globalism”. They’re interested in Space. They want to accelerate their plans to move into Space. The law now gives Corporations claims on Space assets rather than countries owning the assets for “The Queen”. So a corporation can now own Mars. Corporations will dwarf countries on Earth. The East India Company on steroids.

“Richard Yonck, writing in the Scientific American, calls the recent “passage of the Space Act of 2015 in the U.S. House and Senate” the Dawn of the Space Mining Age. In essence, it “gives any American who successfully extracts natural resources from outer space the property rights over the haul.” The act has angered those who believe the cosmos should be free from the greedy scourge of capitalism. For the first time in human history, celestial objects, once the property of all because they were inaccessible to everyone, can be bought and sold by those who can reach them.”

I don’t see the issue really. He is now aiming up, moving his sights up and found the ivory tower crowd infected. You can only poke fun of the quien es mas estupido dregs for so long. Panic should set in when the supposed intellectual elites abandon intellectualism. It is an issue.

Apparently, many of the asteroids wizzing past Earth contain more gold, jewels, and other precious metals than exist on Earth. All the Americans have to do is plant a corporate flag on one of them and then the gold balance sheet changes dramatically. Robots dominate space while Earth collapses.

Your thinking is trapped in a hopelessly human framework. AI and/or sentient robot(s) the more than likely next alpha predator or evolved descendant that the singularity demands do not need asteroids, nor space nor gold nor jewels. They do not need labor nor capital. In fact, one needs to contemplate if a truly omniscient sentient creature can even muster a reason, a point, for being. We may be confronted with the very real and lonely prospect that true sentience is a trap, an evolutionary error. If so, perhaps humans can control robotics and AI. If not, a truly advanced creature won’t have the yolk of the will or impediments to thinking that constrain human thought and programming. In either scenario, it’s clear that humans have too much dependency. You will be choking on your words.

While the blacks whine about “Safe Spaces” and “Micro-Aggressions”, the robots take over. As Marx said, human value is a function of human labor: People find self-worth in the products that they create with their hands. Thanks to the Democrats and Obama, the negro finds himself mired in dependency. If the negro has no work, then he has no value. Robots will thrive in Space. Robots take over.

In the beginning, human value and self-worth were a function of human labor as people saw their own value in the fruits of their labor. Then, via Capitalist production, workers became alienated from their labor as the capitalist owner expropriated the surplus value of the worker’s labor. Then, with the Internet, people found their value and self-worth in public recognition and media fame, publishing lurid sensationalist photos of themselves on Facebook, greedy for public recognition, posting endless blog comments. Farting in the wind hoping against hope that people will notice.

Reverend Jones set the daring apocalyptic vision for the People’s Temple Cult, but it was a male lawyer (Tim Stoen) who did the planning. The white female Maoist cult members who Jones was boning did the implementation. Tim Stoen may have been the only male cult member of the People’s Temple who wasn’t queer.

According to the BBC documentary “The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler”, a charismatic leader is a strong bloke with a Vision who can give a stirring speech and who tells the people what they want to hear without regard for Truth or Reality.

The BLM Movement (a) tells negroes that it’s all because of “White Privilege” and has nothing to do with good or bad morals and hard work; and (b) asks recruits to envision their ideal world of plenty in which they’re respected by white people.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday granted a request from the federal government that essentially secures timely consideration of Obama’s executive actions on immigration — raising the likelihood that the justices will hear the case in the spring and decide it by the end of June, when their current term ends. Texas, the lead plaintiff in 26 REPUBLICAN states’ suit against the executive actions Obama announced last year, had been seeking to delay consideration of the appeal. Too bad, Republicans, your anti-immigration bigotry is going to come back to bite you in the ass right… about June 2016.

I’m reading a scientific analysis of the Big Foot Phenomenon and Movement. One of the major expeditions raided women’s rooms along the highway in Oregon, in order to tempt the Big Guy with the scent of used tampons. How are we going to find Big Foot with clowns like this running around? Why would He allow himself to be found by such rabble?

For those who have little idea what the C400 is, let me explain in a simple language. Take for example a person with a knife (Aviation), running on one, not even two people with machine guns (C400), now I think everyone understands what Russia has installed in Syria.

So the net result of foolish Turkey behavior, totally devoid of common sense, is that the entire Middle East is under 100% control of the Russian air defense.

NATO need to think about the fact that its aircraft could accidentally pose a threat to Russian aircraft, every departure of any combat aircraft is automatically regarded as a potential threat and is followed by C400 radars.

After stupid Turkey’s prank, NATO for a long time has lost the ability to impose its conditions on Russia in Syria. Attempts to impose their rules on Russia have recently led to the annexation of the Crimea, and now the loss of control of the airspace of ME! And all the fun is still ahead…

By controlling the main hub of the world’s trade, Russia has a nice trump card in ongoing fight for the global financial power during the coming crisis. After all, the one who controls the cash tap during the financial crisis has the chance to acquire the most delicious assets.

Last nite I watched Charlie Rose interview interview Hillary Clinton. She stated she would create a ‘no fly zone’ over Syria to create ‘safe space’ (there’s that phrase again, Jim, it must be contagious), enforced by the US Air Force. She really had no answer when he enquired what if Russian aircraft broke into this ‘no fly zone’, except, to paraphrase, ‘they wouldn’t dare’.

Hollande declared war on ISIS, but so far I haven’t seen much activity except for some desultory bombing, that’s all. Where is the 8000 man strong French Foreign Legion, or the vaunted, elite Para Regiments? Why haven’t they been mobilized and deployed? Some of the most highly trained soldiers in the world, these guys shouldn’t have much trouble crushing rag tag Arab Militia, ISIS, hardly soldiers at all, criminals and murderers carrying around AK rifles. In 1900 in no time flat the West, including Russia, the US, France, Germany, Belgium and Great Britain, in days before modern electronic communications, put together and deployed an Expeditionary Force to crush the ‘Boxer Rebellion’ in China and evacuate their countrymen trapped in Peking. The massacre of the remaining Christians in ISIS controlled areas is well known despite the MSM reluctance to report the facts of it, but I haven’t heard much from the Vatican, except the Pope is organizing his forces to combat Climate Change, the single greatest threat faced by Christians.

Really, how pathetic and weak is the West, or what’s left of it? Incidentally, for all you socialists on CFNation, check out yesterdays ‘Big Read’ in the Financial Times of London (American Edition) about Venezuela, and what a violent, shitty, decrepit, gutted, broken down shithole it has become after 15 years of Chavez style socialism, a ‘Thug Nation’ leading the world in murder, kidnapping and international narcotics trade, but with no toilet paper soap on store shelves. I don’t know, are Bolshevik showbiz celebrity millionaires like Danny Glover, Sean Penn, RFK jr, Bill Ayers and Michael Moore still making pilgrimages to Venezuela, or have they found some other Utopia to fly into for the weekend?

Gee BRH, it must have been an oversight but you failed to mention even a few of the right-wing U.S. backed dictators from down south and the tranquil states they ruled over:: Juan Vincente Gomez, Manuel Estrada Cabrera, Jorge Ubico, Rafael Trujillo, Efrain Rios Montt, Revolutionary Government Junta of El Salvador, Hugo Banzer, Brazillian Military Govt., National Reorganization Process, Argentina,Somoza Family, the Duvaliers’ of Haiti, Norriega and Torrijos of Panama, and who can forget Augusto Pinochet of Chile.

The only thing missing from your oversight besides the long aforementioned list is Mark Steyn, narrator.

Actually, the Financial Times leans left and actually was partial to Chavez in the early days. That being so, I was surprised to see such an honest appraisal of the ‘Revolution’ 15 years on. And I hadn’t realized it was that bad down there, either, (living conditions and violence)

United States due to the crisis the two-party political system, which is already visible to the naked eye, unable to work out a common position on foreign policy, and American diplomacy has become a special un-intelligence service, or rather a pack of cynical wolves, foaming at the mouth with bloody fangs in three rows, compared with which the CIA and the Pentagon is a kindergarten on a green lawn, a refuge for naive idealists.

And now this special service is trying hard to break into the White House close to the coveted red button as the Hitler’s general Paulus to Stalingrad in 1942 and all that is happening in the world, including a sudden, “Erdogan berserk moment” is somehow a periphery of US election campaign.

And that election campaign will be unprecedented in its ferocity, with both Parties (that is, Party of War and Party of Peace) unlikely to adhere to at least some of the rules and restrictions developed during the two short centuries of American history.

Iraq Will File Protest at UNSC if Turkey Confirmed to Be Buying Daesh Oil

Baghdad will immediately lodge a protest in the UN Security Council if claims that Turkey is involved in oil smuggling with Islamic State terrorists are confirmed, the Iraqi Defense Ministry said Wednesday.

“Honey, come see what I wrote in the CFN comments today…”
“Why, you’re incorrigible, Sweetie….such a naughty pundit!
By the way, Mr. Anarchy, I’ll be having lunch with the gals today,
but I made you a sandwich–it’s in the fridge. Have fun with your
Cluster friends!”

All current events fit into a fabric of expiring this year “The Third World Reboot”. It takes place not as hot (as World War II), but as informational-psychological war with the local military or other actions aimed at creating to competitors certain economic difficulties, overloads, distracting them from more important “theaters of Reboot action” in which comes together the new global balance of power.

For example, all the Ukrainian affair was aimed not only to tie the military power and financial resources of Russia, but also deprive it of the ability to act as a key player in the BRICS, G20 and, most importantly, in the Middle East. When that failed, other key players rushed to negotiate in Sochi on Russia’s participation in the settlement in Syria, and more precisely – around Israel, and to freeze for the time being the situation in Ukraine.

Many have repeated one correct maxim – during the global Reboot those will benefit who tabled their trump cards at the last moment, even if they were initially smaller than those of competitors. But who did not, mistaken the round to be a play-through, not decisive, were late, even having the trillions in financial resources.

Therefore, Russia managed to be right on time to the Middle East divisions of spheres of influence and leadership roles in the new global order, and China was not.

Q, thanks for bringing to attention some of the pathetically stupid shit shoved at us by the left.

“War on women”? Seriously? “War”? Since when?

Don’t forget Islamophobia. I mean, “phobia”? Really? Does disdain for specific religions now qualify as a medical-psychiatric condition? Oh and HOMOPHOBIA. Good grief.

Mind you, users of this idiot rhetoric, far from raising the level of discourse, every day and in every way, lower it. At the same time they act all “enlightened” and “intellectual” and expect to be regarded as such. Well, not by me. They make Trump look like Einstein.

These are the same “progressives” (a contradiction in terms) that need “safe spaces” from views they disagree with. It’s no secret that these same bubble-heads, Jesus help us, are likely to inherit the reins of power. Aren’t they the intellectual elite?

Given that disagreement causes them such distress, you wonder, what of the fate of Western Civ when it passes into their custody? What happens when they’re faced with real threat and, for example, they’re eyeball-to-eyeball with bearded killers?

Obama hasn’t yet realized that putting on airs at the podium doesn’t impress half his own country-men, never mind psychopaths that get depressed if they’re not planning to kill, not with bombs from thousands of feet up, but up close and personal with a knife.

Given Western indolence and local indifference-acquiescence, it seems that, as the months pass, ISIS will become an immovable fact.

So, sooner or later, maybe some years from now, somebody will have to talk to the beards. Better it be the locals.

Or maybe Putin. Heaven forfend it be Hillary (given the fubar she made of Libya) or, worse still, a dainty Princeton safe-space cadet sitting across from al-Baghdadi. No “safe spaces” there.

I suspect those overseas beheaders, whose ambition it is to hoist their black flag over America, already took the measure of those ninnies.

Amazing that some people still believe foreign policy is being dictated by ideological (allegedly/on the surface) politicians when, IMO, it’s The Banksters/Elite/One Percent/Military Industrial Complex doing the dictating of policy decisions.

And yet when the rare courageous politician dares to speak the truth regarding the war profiteering conglomerate, they are derisively termed “a dainty Princeton safe-space cadet”. In other words, the Bankster Gang has nothing to fear in terms of ‘Main Street Pitchforks’ when the everyday man on the street is so susceptible to propaganda and the notion that politicians are pulling the puppet strings.

Can you imagine ISIS being in power if we had just left Iraq in the hands of Saddam & his merry men?” – Captain Spaulding

You’re right, events would have gone on a different trajectory.

Sooner or later though Saddam would have died, naturally or otherwise. I doubt that succession planning was high on his agenda.

No matter though, there was likely no shortage of butcher boys in the Baath Party, not least his own two raping, murdering sons, waiting in the wings, biding their time.

Having said that, who knows how orderly or disorderly the succession would have been. Would one successor quickly get the assent of the local oligarchs, the party and army brass? Or would there be competing contenders each with their own power base, each willing to inflict a blood-fest to get power? The state after all was a valuable asset.

If it was the latter, if it was a power struggle, would Iran see a opening to jump in and help the Shiite majority get out from under the Sunnis?

Lots of possible outcomes, a Sunni-Shia slugfest not the least of them.

The precedent that is unparalleled in modern history: Russia openly publishes data that one of the NATO countries is directly financing a large group of international terrorists

Russian Defense Ministry published a scheme of supply of oil to Turkey from DAESH, satellite photos as evidence.

It is clear that Erdogan would call this falsification, and Russian military themselves understand it, formulated with relish: “We do not expect Mr. Erdogan to resign, even if his face would be smeared with stolen oil.”

It’s not you WikiLeaks, Snowdens and other informational games, with not very significant people. This is a direct formal statement of one subject of international politics to another. This is a qualitatively new international development. The precedent that is unparalleled in modern history.

“A prosecutor found that while Mr. Berger had destroyed some of the papers, he had taken only copies, so nothing was permanently lost. Mr. Berger pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge, paid a $50,000 fine and temporarily lost his security clearance.” –NYT

WPA-CCC, I made it perfectly clear before that you are an incorrigible f*****g moron, and f*****g morons believe what they’re told to believe despite all available evidence. But please, confirm your f******g moronity anyway, despite it being beyond suspicion and all…

The majority of mass casualty shootings in the USA are done by domestic terrorists who are native-born white Christian males. We should profile them and confiscate their assault weapons. Maybe, as Trump said, it is time to create a database and register white Christian males. White males may need to be deported to insure the public safety.

Wpa,
Would you be so good as to offer a draft (first or otherwise) of your proposed law targeting potential shooter/terrorists? Please be specific regarding the profiling. Oh, yes…and define assault weapons. I thank you in advance.

Law? Is Trump talking about passing laws? We are talking national security. Immediate action may be needed, bypassing congress and the constitution. Security from white terrorist attacks is paramount.

If white males are the shooters, ALL white males are suspects, subject to database registration and deportation, especially if they have a history of believing they are Taxed Enough Already (TEA pary) or have contributed to anti-government blogs like CFN.

The weapons to be confiscated should include any kind of gun used by white Christian terrorists in their mass casualty attacks. The 143 guns possessed by the white Christian terrorists in attacks include dozens of automatic assault weapons and semi-automatic handguns with high-capacity magazines. For example, a .40-caliber Glock was used by a white male terrorist to slaughter students in Red Lake, Minnesota, in 2005, so too did the white male terrorist in Aurora, along with an AR-15 assault rifle, when blasting away at his victims in a darkened movie theater. In Newtown, Connecticut, the white terrorist wielded a .223 Bushmaster semi-automatic assault rifle as he massacred 20 school children and six adults.

Yes, Wpac, taking my gun away will make you feel all warm and fuzzy. Abrogate all the rights given via the Constitution and the Bill of rights for a disengenuous promise of safety. The police will protect you.

Question for our readers (Thank you, Fred), Of the hundreds of thousands of felony crimes committed every year in this country, how many were stopped by the police…uhhh, none. The police did respond to the crime scène and filled out the proper paperwork, and maybe even found some “clues”.

Question for our readers. How many guns will be forfeited to the Federal Government by criminals, in accordance with the new laws you promulgate? Damned few…remember…CRIMINALS.

Question for our readers. What do you tell a female (?) blogger with two black eyes? Nothing! You’ve already told her twice…I’m sure you have heard the joke before….

Wpac, you are intelligent, well read, and a serial provocateur. I, personally,do not believe most of what you write is consistent with your own, privately held, beliefs…you cannot be so out of touch with the vagaries of human nature.

If you read almost any essay on the Islamic invasion of Europe, you’ll likely find the author referring to European civilization as “Christian.” But is it?

Europe has a Christian culture: Chartres cathedral; the paintings in the Vatican and the Uffizi; the writings of Aquinas, Dante, Pascal, Dostoevsky; the gentleman’s code. Except for the last, all these are relics, leftovers from the age when Europe used to be Christian. Nowadays it isn’t.

For the majority of Europeans, the core idea of Christianity, the idea that a person’s post-life circumstances depend on the death and resurrection of a carpenter in Roman Palestine, is an idea too preposterous to be believed. Therefore they don’t believe it.

Europe of the present is a museum of Christian artifacts. Europeans may be Christian in some cultural sense, they may be, but they aren’t Christians metaphysically, which means they aren’t Christians at all.

To call European civilization “Christian” is to sound a rallying cry. Won’t work. Europe’s defenders will have to find another one.

The same can be said for that platitudinous drivel about “judeo-christian values”. It does not exist. This country was founded as a republic based on the roman/occidental model with extraordinary effort to keep it free FROM religion. Laws against murder, adultery, and theft exist in the most primitive societies to the complex societies never infiltrated by crazy middle-eastern religion. They are examples of universal human values codification or not.

America was founded by Christians seeking religious freedom and by people seeking riches. Sometimes the same people were doing both. The First Congressional Congress was bickering until Representative Cushing suggested starting every session with a prayer. Things went better after that. So you are, basically, wrong.

But I agree the term Judeo-Christian would have baffled them. Christians were the Chosen People and they had no need of Jews. Judeo-Christian is a new concept by Jews for Christian dupes. Certainly no Jew believes it.

Closer to your thesis perhaps, is the Masonic contribution. Masons were and are free thinkers and Deists. And they did help any one Denomination from dominating and making us a Theocracy. Doubters of Christian Dogma like Jefferson were far too wise to disparage Christianity openly. They knew that a Nation needs a religion – and that something like Masonry was going to serve the average person. Now days many people believe nothing – and therefore believe anything, even worshiping people like Obama or Hillary, or Science or even their Race.

Janos, the founders were deists who believed in the moral teachings—but not divinity—of Jesus. Doesn’t pass the smell test; the founders wouldn’t be considered christians by today’s “christians” who especially wouldn’t like messing with the bible, cutting out all the black words and only keeping the red words, like Jefferson did.

wpa-expanding on your comment on “founders” as deists. all historical mentions of jesus are within the confines of the bible, which is a book that is used to rationalize itself. the writings about jesus were all written well after his supposed life and death, with no instances of contact between the writers and their subject. if jesus was the famous character the bible says he was, followed constantly by multitudes, he would have been documented in many writings of that time, including the dead sea scrolls. he is not. the new testament was written in greek. another very similar character in greek mythology named Hercules was written extensively about in literature of the time. jesus is only in the new testament and a few religious texts outside the canon. he was mostly likely invented by the writers for reasons of their own.

The existence of counterfeit money is proof that the real exists. You are in morbio inferiore, the dry gulch, the nigredo, the 2nd stage. Hold onto my first sentence and it can serve as the Ariadne thread to find your way out.

In the name of promoting greater diversity on university campuses, in addition to purging founding figures such as Woodrow Wilson and rewriting history to suit present day sensibilities, should universities also create “Safe Spaces” for different human species?:

Frank,
Arguably, the Fed had a great hand in promoting the American middle class, and the relative wealth we all grew up experiencing. You could almost give it credit for the American Dream. Did the Fed, and we by extension, screw the rest of the world and thereby benefit? Hell yes! Did you, when you purchased your first car or house, weep for the disenfranchised and abused in the colonies? Hell no! It was ‘Merica, Dammit, and our birthright.

The sufficient money supply, generated by the Fed, provided for cheap imports, living wage jobs, and a powerful military.

Now, however, the chickens come home to roost. The Fed gave us the brand new Cadillac, and we were living large. Many years down the line, however, the Caddy won’t start… the crankshaft won/t crank, the distributor won’t distribute, and the pistons, well, you know the story.

Frank,
Perspective. The Fed gave us a great lifestyle, until it didn’t. The UN (League of Nations) was formed with the best of intentions…unfortunately, humans became involved with its operation. Institutional racism? I don’t know if he was any more of a “racist” than average, if you can accurately define the term.

Funny thing about generational history. There were many bright, educated, articulate and observant people in Wilson’s generation, he certainly being one of them…what did they see and know that we have forgotten? Does a culture in which you are raised trump a life of education and introspection? Age supposedly brings wisdom, and yet that wisdom is challenged, almost off handedly, and discounted by now-current populist opinion. Popular opinion is generated from historical references, and who writes the history? Wpac’s history, or Janos’s?

Too often a historical personage is pilloried by superficial observations. A life dismissed too casually, over ever-changing, knee-jerk populist sentiment.

Should we erase George Washington from the dollar bill and burn down Mt. Vernon because he owned negro slaves?

As a young child, I first learned the word “motherfucker” from out-of-control negro kids running wild on the deck of boat on a boat trip up the Potomac River to tour Mt. Vernon. The negroes didn’t tour Mt. Vernon. They got off at an amusement park.

During the Cultural Revolution in China, the Maoist Red Guards decided that for all traffic stop lights, the green light meant “stop” and the red light meant “go”. I don’t know what they decided to do about stop signs and vehicle brake lights?

They decided red meant go because they were firebrand lunatics. Green is a cool color in relation to red and measured individuals cultivate the paradox. For example, green, being a cool color in relation to red, stimulates a proceed with caution color psychology mentality: a cautionary reticence for the collective safety of greater society . If red were to mean go, the color psychology of red would stimulate far too much “forward fire” through a given intersection and traffic would degenerate into a Chinese fire drill mentality: red lights being run like Red Guards razing the villages of civility

Red is a very dominating color visually and thus the perfect eye catcher for “STOP”- again to enlist the paradox.

Beyond that red and green are opposites on the color wheel just as Stop and Go are in meaning.

In discussing the new US law signed into law by Obama on November 25, 2015, which gives US companies the right to own assets in Outer Space, the CEOs of start up space exploration companies refer to humans moving out into space “to become an interplanetary species.”

“SpaceX founder and Tesla CEO Elon Musk is a bookish billionaire — as we’ve reported before, he has a love of all things science fiction.

On Monday, he tweeted about a favorite book that’s helped clarify his galactic ambitions.

“Reread Asimov’s Foundation series,” he said. “Brilliant.”

In interviews, Musk has said that “Foundation” by Isaac Asimov is “one of the best books” that he’s ever read.

The trilogy tells the story of an intergalactic empire that falls to pieces, with a dark age waiting on the other side.

“Foundation” is a “futuristic version of Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,'” he told the Guardian, referencing the famous history that followed Rome from its breathtaking heights to the fall of Byzantium.

From “Foundation,” Musk learned that every civilization — including our own — will one day falter.

“The lessons of history would suggest that civilizations move in cycles,” Musk told the Guardian. “You can track that back quite far — the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We’re obviously in a very upward cycle right now and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not. There could be some series of events that cause that technology level to decline.”

And when that happens in our case — when humanity hits its own dark age — what’s the best thing we can do to make sure it’s as short as possible?

By having the human race become, to use Musk’s favored terminology, interplanetary.

Thus the need for SpaceX, the privatized space exploration company that Musk started back when only nation-states were trying to launch rockets out of Earth’s atmosphere.

“Given that this is the first time in 4.5 billion years where it’s been possible for humanity to extend life beyond Earth,” he said, “it seems like we’d be wise to act while the window was open and not count on the fact it will be open a long time.”

This Humanity is coming to an end. Most will die in the Little Ice Age that is now developing, expected to peak around 2030. That we are not planning for it, but instead for Global Warming shows our unfitness for survival.

I hate to say it, but the die off might be just the thing we need to improve the Race. Human Race? That too.

I am glad that Russia, represented by its Department of Defense, started a well-documented, non-conspiratorial process of showing the world that there is no such thing as “freelance” terrorism – all terror gets sponsored by much more powerful players on the world stage.

Is it a way to create certain emotional background in the minds of the “voters”? Is it one wing of political elite sending a message to another, that only “they” could hear loud and clear? Is it a way to create a circumstantial push to undertake certain, otherwise undesired actions by opposing party?

Probably, all of the above. One thing that is completely impossible in our age of “deep state” and total surveillance – a “lone gunman” (or “lone gunmen” – lol).

As you know, the IMF has recently included the Chinese Yuan in the list of reserve currencies. Now the central banks of different nations of the world will be able to save money not only in dollars and, say, the euro, but also in Yuan.

The IMF has a “currency” (SDR), the price of which, until recently, was determined based on the value of the four major currencies – the dollar, euro, pound and yen. The relationship between the currencies in the basket has not significantly changed for decades:

China has long been trying to push Yuan, but was always refused, on the pretext that its economy does not meet the criteria of the IMF. On November 30, it was decided nevertheless to include the Yuan in the basket – by giving it a share of 10.92%.

Can it be said that China has won?

Perhaps, yes. But it is not clear victory – China won the next financial round “on points.” Firstly, the share of 10.92%, though a significant, but still does not reflect the leading role of China in world trade.
Secondly, China has not received its share at the expense of the dollar, which would be logical, but at the expense of the euro, the yen and the pound. The Americans have sacrificed their satellites to leave the dollar safe.

Third, the Yuan will be included in the basket not immediately, but only after a year – and the IMF demanded that this year China loosened capital controls. For China, however, who just started to experience difficulties with the currency outflow abroad, weakening control over the movement of money would not be desirable.

A year later, when the Yuan will be in the IMF basket, will create a good demand for the Yuan from the central banks of different countries. But this delay of a year for China means a loss of several hundred billion dollars – not fatal, but still unpleasant.

The IMF is moving in the right direction, though not very fast. If reforms continue, then, perhaps, the IMF has a good chance to survive the global financial crisis and maintain its role as important financial infrastructural institution.

TASS: DAESH prepares in the Libyan Sirte pilots on new flight simulators

It is noted that simulators allow you to practice the technique of takeoff and landing of the aircraft to determine the location in latitude and longitude, to communicate with the conditional control tower

Why I have a feeling that the landing part will not be high on their training agenda? Libya – smashing success of Hillary as SecState.

Buck, do you think it’s the Koch Bros sitting across from al-Baghdadi?

You’ve got my meaning all upside down. Yes, Washington is bought and paid for. Yes, politicians are the front men for business interests. Nobody with functioning eye-balls doubts it.

As such, politicians surely do the bidding of their oligarch masters. There’s not a whit of difference between the Democrats and Republicans in that respect. But they represent different parts of the country and, as such, they sing the tunes popular in those regions.

For the politicians it’s all about getting elected. Jeb would run as a transgender lesbian if he thought it would help. And the oligarchs just want their man in office. If it means that their man runs as a tranny then so be it.

That the Dems collect less loot from oligarch coffers only means they do their whoring on the cheap. Even the billionaire class love a good deal. Don’t kid yourself, they ALWAYS look at the price tag.

But the current crop of Washington politicians stinking up Capitol Hill have their own long established, absurdist lexicon ie the ninny-istic “Islamophobia” from the idiot Left. Or, if you like, “class-warfare”, “entitlement reform” from their Rightward counterparts. Either way, they don’t employ the same rhetoric (at least, not that I’ve heard) as the feeble-brained, micro-aggression-safe-spacers still in school, waiting their turn at power.

Still, the inter-face between the oligarch class and the political class isn’t smooth. I can imagine the suits in their mansions wincing at Obama-Hillary-Kerry fubars and angrily picking up the phone. Can you see it?

It may not yet be the done thing to have the Koch Bros or Jamie Dimon appearing in public and formally speaking on behalf of the US the way that John Kerry does, or Obama or Hillary. That day may yet come but it isn’t here quite yet. Behind the scenes maybe. But not in full public view. We still maintain the façade of “democracy”.

Still, do you think the Koch Bros sit across from al-Baghdadi? I don’t think so. I don’t think the bros have the stones. I think they’d piss their pants. But I can imagine at the table some laser-eyed Turk with his own retinue of murderers. After all, they say that ISIS sell their oil in Turkey. Doesn’t happen by magic.

In any case we rely on whatever meat-sacks the President chooses (no doubt after canvassing oligarch opinion). Maybe you have high regard for an Ivy League education and maybe you’re ok with one of the mincing Princeton “dainties” sitting across from a low-down goon like Putin or some ISIS butcher.

But not me. I have no such high regard for the diploma nor the bearer. What are the odds of finding current Ivy Leaguers that have it in them? The world is too hot a place for such delicate snowflakes.

Just as foreigners have already taken the measure of this alleged intellectual elite and leadership-in-waiting, so have the oligarchs. I have too. Have you?

I appreciate your thoughtful response but I disagree with your premise that a ‘strong man’ personality in and of itself and no doubt contrived –politicians of any persuasion are not “strong men”; those doing their bidding are the true warriors –will impress a Putin type. In fact, that type of pretentious bravado would probably insult Putin’s intelligence.

Enter military capability. To my eyes, what you’re writing suggests that we need a current day “Ronald Reagan” in contrast to a Jimmy Carter to stare down the ‘evil doers’ sitting on the other side of the table. But the problem is not lack of negotiating table bravado, but actual capability. The world has seen the U.S act for the past two decades and it’s not all that awe inspiring in terms of ultimate outcome. Moreover, as we have read, Russia seems to have surpassed the U.S. in some military technology.

To borrow an economic phrase, in terms of military intimidation, the U.S. is fast reaching the point of “pushing on a string”. Been there, done that, and “that” didn’t really impress or help hence the futility of ‘strong arm’ negotiating tactics moving forward.

In other words, no amount of ‘steely eyed’ negotiating pretense can detract from the fact that the U.S. has blown it’s military wad and is now in a ‘refractory’ phase. Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, Marcus Rubio or Hillary Clinton cannot bluff away a “spent missile”.

You are correct again, the United States has not got the military capital to do much more than patrol its own borders. If that.

Nor, IMO, has it got the intellectual capital to do much more than tend to its own precinct. Yeah, I know, American companies do business worldwide, yeah, Americans have forces stationed hither and yon. And so, based on all of this, you’d THINK that there’s a deep well of world knowledge.

However, it’s no use telling me that Americans know this and know that because in the end I judge people by their results. As you say, the results are not all that inspiring. You can say that the results have been downright disastrous. If that deep well of knowledge of other places and other people exists, it’s not doing much good.

I’m not suggesting that the US needs a Ronald Reagan ie as opposed to a Jimmy Carter. Far from it. The idea that world needs US “leadership” is an empty American conceit. The United States has lost all credibility in that regard if it ever had any in the first place. The notion that the United States is the indispensable nation exists in American minds and hardly anywhere else.

That’s why the US should absent itself in all respects from the on-going mess in the Middle East and North Africa. Pull back its forces, get its diplomats and embassies gone from that whole area including Israel.

IMO, especially in that part of the world, the United States has got exactly nothing to offer by way of knowledge or muscle.

Now, the US had a role in creating the mess but was by no means the only factor nor maybe even the dominant factor. For better or worse, this has to be left to the locals especially because it’s their own backyard and they have to live with the results.

Someone will have to talk to the new powers if and when these powers take shape, whether or not they wear beards, whether or not they are to American taste.

But it cannot be Americans doing the talking because, judging by past performance, it will be an epic fuckup.

Will the beards want diplomatic and trade relations? Maybe someday. Then maybe talk directly. Otherwise shut up and stay away.

I tell ya’ these mental midgets that do all the shooting in the USA give us lawful gun owners a bad rep. Cries for gun control are ludicrous. If everyone was packin’ someone could maybe do something. Read “Day of Wrath” by William R. Forstchen . It reads like a carbon copy of the Paris attacks, even though written a year ago. Maybe we should ban good kitchen knives. Silent but certainly deadly. My wife works at a mental health clinic, and although it is not politically correct to say it , many of the patients are “crazy” as a bedbug and there is absolutely no security in the building, The “Crazies” walk throughout the place with impunity. I told her to quit before some disgruntled client goes batshit.

On a lighter note: a joke!
A guy walks into a bar with a shotgun in one hand and a bucket of dog shit in the other. He says to the Barkeep “Give me a coffee”. Waiter says sure, “coming right up”. He gets a tall mug of coffee and drinks it down, picks up the bucket of dog shit, throws it in the air and blasts it with the shotgun. Then he just walks out.
Next day the guy returns. He has his shotgun and another bucket of dog shit. He walks up to the counter and says. ” Give me a coffee”. The Barkeep says “Whoa, buddy We’re still cleaning up your mess from the last time you were here. What the heck was that all about anyway?.
Fella gives a shiteatin’ grin and says” I’m training for an upper management position. Show up for work, drink coffee, shoot the shit, leave a mess for someone else to clean up, and then disappear for the rest of the day.

More than 32,000 people per year are killed by guns in the United States — at least. For decades, the most dangerous piece of machinery was an automobile. But now, it’s a gun. We should treat guns as we treat cars.

Cars have VIN numbers. Guns should have registration numbers. Like with cars, whenever guns change hands in a sale or gifting, the registration should go to the new owner.

To drive a car you need take a test to get a license. To own a gun you should have to take a test to get a license.

To drive a car you need liability insurance for the damage it can cause. To own a gun you should have to have insurance (even if it is cheap, like $100 a year) to help pay for the carnage.

People are killed by toddlers holding guns… the gun owners insurance can help pay the costs to society of 32,000 deaths and even more injuries from their guns.

The real reason the Second Amendment was ratified, and why it says “State” instead of “Country” (the Framers knew the difference – see the 10th Amendment), was to preserve the slave patrol militias in the southern states, which was necessary to get Virginia’s vote. Founders Patrick Henry, George Mason, and James Madison were totally clear on that.

Amendments do not guarantee absolute rights. The First Amendment does not give you the right to scream “Fire” in a crowded theatre. First amendment rights can be conditioned.

Likewise, the Second Amendment does not give you the right to own military grade weapons (Fully-automatic machine guns, RPGs, MANPADs, etc.).

The three main reasons people want to own a gun are self-defense, sports shooting, and hunting. None of those require military grade weapons or high-capacity magazines or automatic or semi-automatic weapons used for mass killings. Congress should pass a law limiting the types of weapons which are legal and make semiautomatic weapons illegal.

My friend, Bernie Sanders, has called for a ban on semiautomatic weapons.

BOULDER, Colo. (TheBlaze/AP) — Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders … called for a ban on semiautomatic weapons in his second straight day of talking about an issue — guns — where he has sometimes deviated from the Democratic Party’s consensus.

In a campaign appearance … Sanders cited two shootings … at universities in Arizona and Texas as well as … slayings at an Oregon community college.

“Instead of people yelling at each other, we have got to come together on commonsense approaches which, in fact, the vast majority of the American people support,” said Sanders, who represents a rural state with few gun laws. He added that there is “widespread support to ban semiautomatic assault weapons, guns which have no other purpose but to kill people.”

Car registration laws have not ended all deaths from cars, but without registration, education, and mandatory liability insurance, things could be much worse…

Gun control laws will not end all gun violence, but gun control will reduce the number of deaths, and is therefore worth doing. It is time to ban semiautomatic weapons.

Assoka, guns do have registration numbers, just like automobiles. The only ones without numbers are ILLEGAL and the numbers have been filed off. These belong to the criminal types such as your much valued illegals and gang members, totally untraceable. Guns are like a hammer, it has a purpose but is totally capable of killing. Have you looked of the stats for hammer killings in the US. You would be surprised. I for one can’t drive a nail without a decent framing hammer. Perhaps we should register hammers?

“Your Friend” Bernie Sanders? Have you actually met and talked to your friend Bernie? Real Vermont Yankees can’t stand his politics. It is the imports with the ski chalets from NY and other moneyed locals buying up the Green Mountain State which support him. I have friends in VT. and they can’t stomach his socialist policies. Talk to a home grown sugar tapper and you will get an earful!

In discussing the new US law signed into law by Obama on November 25, 2015, which gives US companies the right to own assets in Outer Space, the CEOs of start up space exploration companies refer to humans moving out into space “to become an interplanetary species.”

“SpaceX founder and Tesla CEO Elon Musk is a bookish billionaire — as we’ve reported before, he has a love of all things science fiction.

On Monday, he tweeted about a favorite book that’s helped clarify his galactic ambitions.

“Reread Asimov’s Foundation series,” he said. “Brilliant.”

In interviews, Musk has said that “Foundation” by Isaac Asimov is “one of the best books” that he’s ever read.

The trilogy tells the story of an intergalactic empire that falls to pieces, with a dark age waiting on the other side.

“Foundation” is a “futuristic version of Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,'” he told the Guardian, referencing the famous history that followed Rome from its breathtaking heights to the fall of Byzantium.

From “Foundation,” Musk learned that every civilization — including our own — will one day falter.

“The lessons of history would suggest that civilizations move in cycles,” Musk told the Guardian. “You can track that back quite far — the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We’re obviously in a very upward cycle right now and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not. There could be some series of events that cause that technology level to decline.”

And when that happens in our case — when humanity hits its own dark age — what’s the best thing we can do to make sure it’s as short as possible?

By having the human race become, to use Musk’s favored terminology, interplanetary.

Thus the need for SpaceX, the privatized space exploration company that Musk started back when only nation-states were trying to launch rockets out of Earth’s atmosphere.

“Given that this is the first time in 4.5 billion years where it’s been possible for humanity to extend life beyond Earth,” he said, “it seems like we’d be wise to act while the window was open and not count on the fact it will be open a long time.”

No boundaries between Hallucination and Reality; No boundaries between Male and Female; No boundaries between black and white; No boundaries between Right and Wrong; No boundaries between Heaven and Hell; No boundaries between Pleasure and Pain, Young and Old, Life and Death, Earth and Space; No boundaries between Coke and Pepsi, between Christmas and Hanukkah, between McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken; No boundaries between Business Class and Economy Class—Communism!

Exactly. The realization of the Left’s anthem, John Lennon’s “Imagine”. Everything mixing, all colors becoming gray. All boundaries of skin and bone dissolving back into the primal ooze. Who needs cell walls either? They’re just walls. Cancer cells are poorly defined. I am you and you are me and we are all together – in the primal swamp. How good it feels?

Hatred is one of the forces of Evolution – the negative or stick side. The other is the various forms of Love – the positive or carrot side.

The Techno-State has aped this reality with dichotomy of methods, the negative being 1984 terror and the “positive” being Brave New World feelies, orgies, and soma. I’ll take Sweden! So will the Muslims. They turn all this on its head by enjoying Brave New World while hating it at the same time. Enjoy Las Vegas and then go do 9/11. The victims of yesterday’s shooting had thrown the couple a baby shower – what hate!

Actually, JHK might have mentioned the 100 years of forced deportations to Siberia of 200,000 native Tartars from their homeland Crimea.Throughout time, before 1800, the Tartars were the main indigenous population. I’m afraid there is too much magic in the pedandtic statements made related to the traditional people inhabiting Crimea. By the way, Ukraine and the Tartars get along just fine.

Moreover, the ostentatious author overlooked the mass killing of Ukrainians by the Stalin induced famine of 1932-33. How convenient to proclaim you are the majority of the Donbas Region when you have committed genocide of the real inhabitants who have lived there throughout the ages.

Tryp all too typically leaves out the rape of Moscow by the Crimean Tartars. These people came from the depths of Asia. They are invaders. Don’t go back 100 years and imagine you’ve gone back to the beginning of creation. The chain of causality is endless but we can do a “bit” better than that – at least some of us can.

Some white Christian terrorists are becoming angry because they have to drive 300 to 400 miles just to find a women’s health clinic still open to shoot at… since Republicans have forced so many clinics to close.

One week it’s the right wing lunatic killing innocents; the following week, the ‘Muslim terrorist’. Or at least according to those seeking to capitalize on a specific agenda.

How about this. Going forward it will be neither; it will be the economically disenfranchised. For example, the college graduate with exorbitant student loan debt who discovers that his student loan that he thought was forgiven after 20 or 25 years is now an IRS bill of not just the principal, but the accrued and capitalized interest. His twenty thousand dollar loan is now two hundred thousand bucks of taxable “income”.

Yeah, when the bullets really start flying it wont be Mustafa or some right wing nutjob. It’s going to be that nice kid you once knew and who had such high hopes for himself but instead spent his best years working at Starbucks saddled with debt and unable to land a career worthy of his higher education financial investment. Life for this former All-American lad is now as hopeless as his financial prospects. And he is angry: Fucking Angry

He did, however, save up just enough money for a deadly weapon befitting of a ‘well regulated militia man’. As far as he is concerned his life is over but not before he makes somebody pay with their own lives, too.

And that is the America that the ‘Vampire Squid’ has created and the one that will increasingly reveal itself.

Donald says thousands upon thousands of Muslims were celebrating as they watched the planes slam into the Twin Towers. They were on rooftops watching and cheering. They had tailgate parties going on the rooftops. I saw it… in Patterson, New Jersey… thousands upon thousands of Muslims celebrating and cheering on rooftops in tailgate parties. Hundreds of people reported it.

The White Man is terrible in telling the truth. Mustafa, Jamal, and Jose could not get thousands upon thousands of cars onto rooftops in Patterson, New Jersey or anywhere else. There was no cheering, no celebrating on rooftops, no tailgate parties. It is all Donald Trump’s big bigoted lie. Have you ever seen thousands upon thousands of cars on any rooftop… in any city… in any year?

Actually Assoka, There are parking structures all over the US with more then a thousand parking spots on the roof. I am not sure about Patterson, NJ. But there are structures out there for the happy motoring crowd. I drove to Vegas with my daughter and half the time we could not find our car. After a coupla’ times we were writing down the parking level and lot number.

Since scientists began keeping record in 1880, 2014 saw the highest average global temperature for both land and ocean. Weather events caused by El Niño, which refers to warmer-than-average waters in the Eastern equatorial Pacific, are 20 to 30 percent more severe today than they have been in 7,000 years.

Water scarcity already affects one out of 10 people worldwide, and extreme weather patterns are compromising fresh water supplies.

According to researchers at NASA and the University of California, Irvine, a disappearing section of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet appears to be in “an irreversible state of decline.” This glacier, along with others, are melting much faster than scientists expected and will contribute greatly to rising sea levels.

According to a U.N. climate report from last year, rising sea levels will probably affect 70 percent of the world’s coastlines by 2100 — that’s about 147 million to 216 million people who will lose their homes to submersion or flooding.

Last year, the Obama administration launched the National Climate Assessment, which found that America’s current drought “represents the driest conditions in 800 years.”

Climate change is affecting certain ecosystems, killing off entire habitats, and acidifying oceans, which puts more than a million species of animals and plants in danger of extinction.

The U.N.’s “Synthesis Report” from last year warns that if we don’t take action now, the world will be 7.2 degrees F above pre-industrial temperatures by the end of the century. It put in very terrifying terms:

“Continued emission of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and long-lasting changes in all components of the climate system, increasing the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems.”

*Last year, the Obama administration launched the National Climate Assessment, which found that America’s current drought “represents the driest conditions in 800 years.”*

This suggests that 800 years ago there was a similar drought.

Hence… What?

The fact is natural gas is replacing coal at an accelerating pace in bulk electricity production (still required for cities) and emits half the CO2 per BTU. This will be good for reducing ocean acidification assuming there is a provable correlation with atmospheric CO2 levels. Rooftop solar has just achieved escape velocity and frankly threatens the standard electrical utility business model projected out ten years.

The beef against gas in the past has been price uncertainty relative to coal. At the moment this is not a concern and there may be enough supplies to bridge a transition to an ever higher penetration of renewables, including power-station-scale renewable generation which like it or not (when it’s intemperate outside you like it — admit it) is still required and will be required for cities.

There is friction between grid-tied renewables and the standard power utility business model that needs to be resolved. You cannot have your cake and eat it too. Those generation/transmission/distribution systems with wires to your house come with an operations and maintenance price tag.

My point is that the change you believe in is already in process and we do not need grandiose political sleights-of-hand (cap-and-trade) that are in reality nothing but scams.

The global warming movement is an excellent example of contemporary hysteria and irrationality. Many agree about this, but I don’t think they are aware that it is also a fine example of the effects of unrestrained extravert behaviour ‘en masse’.

In her book about introverts, ‘Quiet’, Susan Caine describes Al Gore as an introvert but I was always uneasy about this even though Gore himself seems to have endorsed this view. Reading about his role in the AGW movement recently it seemed impossible that he was not an extravert (emotionalism, rhetoric, cliché, personalized criticism of ‘Climate Deniers’, cavalier dealings with facts and truth (to put it politely), naïve belief in a fashionable cause that ‘everyone’ supports (and whose opponents are motivated almost by definition by dishonourable motives, like greed, or inexplicable personal perversity) among other traits). I checked him out again and he is of course an extravert.

Terrorism is a growing threat today. The Afghanistan problem has not been resolved. The situation there is alarming and gives us no optimism, while some of the yet recently stable and rather well-doing countries in the Middle East and North Africa – Iraq, Libya and Syria – have now plunged into chaos and anarchy that pose a threat to the whole world.

We all know why that happened. We know who decided to oust the unwanted regimes and brutally impose their own rules. Where has this led them? They stirred up trouble, destroyed the countries’ statehood, set people against each other, and then “washed their hands”, as we say in Russia, thus opening the way to radical activists, extremists and terrorists.

There are first assessments of how official status of the Yuan as a reserve currency will impact on Chinese economy. Experts expect that the additional inflow of capital into Yuan assets before 2020 will amount to 600 billion dollars: $400 billion – from the largest investment funds, including sovereign wealth funds, and another $200 billion – from private companies and individual investors.

However, there are negative assessments. Their essence is that the Yuan will start to appreciate in price, and this will weaken the already unstable Chinese exports. Some experts even believe that the further development of the real economy in China is at risk; China will gradually turn into a financial economy, and this model requires the military enforcement of its currency, just as Britain did in XIX – first half of XX century, and the United States in the twentieth century – the beginning of the twenty-first century.

What are you not willing to see? Perhaps that which is closest to you – yourself? If you look, you may be able to see your elf, the imp of the perverse, responsible for so many of the disasters in our lives.

I never used the word evil. I only pointed out their actions against women yesterday when Republicans en masse voted against women having access to health care for millions of women. I call it a war against women. Republicans will pay the price at the polls.

“Unfortunately, there are a group of people that are uneducated,” said Imam Abu Nahidian, the religious leader at Manassas Mosque.

He said that the caller on the voice mail claimed to be part of a Jewish group. “We are checking if one Jew has been killed in California. You all will be sorry. You all will be killed,” Nahidian reported the caller saying.

Nahidian’s mosque has been vandalized several times in recent years, including an incident in August 2014 when someone spray-painted an expletive and broke a glass door before children attending the congregation’s summer classes arrived to see the damage.

“If they were reasonable, they would ask questions,” Nahidian said of Americans who say that his religion foments terrorism. “Then I would tell them, ‘No, our faith would never do something like that.’ ”

He added: “ISIS has no understanding of Islam — not only Islam, but humanity. It is not the Islamic State. It is a terrorist state.”

fodase, you obviously know nothing about Islam. You probably do not have any Muslim friends or acquaintances. Muslims and liberals agree with you: they are vociferous in condemning terrorism.

SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. (AP) — The woman who helped her husband kill 14 people at a holiday banquet for his county co-workers pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group and its leader on Facebook using an alias, then deleted the messages before the attack, a U.S. law enforcement official said Friday.

I reckon erased hard drives can be made to say whatever “law enforcement” wants them to say. How could you prove otherwise?

We demand an end to the incendiary rhetoric from anti-abortion activists and lawmakers that demonizes Planned Parenthood doctors and patients. The smear campaign and false accusations that motivated the attack in Colorado Springs must stop.

We aren’t going anywhere. Planned Parenthood has been here for nearly 100 years, and we will keep being here as long as women, men, and young people need health care with dignity.

In the US all women have freedom to choose a safe and legal abortion. It is a right supported by the Supreme Court. Women can receive health care of their choice. If that involves a medical procedure, it is a private matter between her doctor and herself. It is her personal choice. 100% of women coming to the clinic are being harrassed in the Republican war on women. Some fanatic Christian terrorists scream hate and fire bullets at all women because the Christian Taliban do not approve of the 3% of women who may choose to safely abort the cells growing inside them. Even if some women might not choose an abortion, legally speaking they must respect the right of other women to choose otherwise.

She is the Attorney General, Janos, with a lot of experience busting gangsters, drug dealers, and organized crime. She gets convictions and has no fear.

If you (janos, fodase et al.) think she is joking, just keep up your violent hate speech and see what happens. Loretta Lynch is very clear that aggressive action will be taken against people whose anti-Muslim rhetoric “edges towards violence.”

I stand with our attorney general and with the Muslim community who are victims of white supremacist racists like you.

She was chosen by the odious Holder and is just a female clone of him. No Black brain ever came up with anything like the Bill of Rights. They really don’t believe in it, even if their lips said yes when they took the oath of office. Like the Arabs and Latinos, strength is everything to them so they’ll always go with a Strong Man.

In the US all women have freedom to choose a safe and legal abortion. – wpa

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Well, at least we know YOU didn’t knock up any of these women since you got a vasectomy at age 18. This was back when you feared for mother earth due to over population. Now your concern is not so much.

421 women have died as a result of legal abortion from 1973-2010, or an average of 11 women per year. (CDC)

32,000 die from guns every year.

What is Islam’s position on abortion?

You still don’t get it? Abortion is legal for Muslim women, indeed for ALL women, in the United States. In Islam, the fetus is believed to become a living soul after four months of gestation, and abortion after that point is generally viewed as impermissible. But in the United States Muslim women have the legal right to a safe abortion. The decision is between her and her physician… no one else.

Must be Allah. Like the Fukushima tsunami that caused nuclear plant disaster that happened a few days after then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton assured Japan of US military support in solving the territorial dispute between Japan and Russia over Kuril Islands.

I heard an Irish missionary priest talking about this country (or it may have been Burundi, or both) who said that one of the crazy things about it was that the Hutsi and the Tutsis were practically indistinguishable.

The late Raymond Crotty, an Irish self-taught farmer, self-taught economist and academic, and Third World agricultural advisor (he said that while a few of his fellow experts had some practical experience in tillage he alone knew anything about stock keeping) mentions the two peoples in his superb ‘Ireland in Crisis’, which despite its title is also a concise history of world agricultural, the development of capitalism (and agricultural thing, not commercial) and capitalist colonialism.

As I remember it the cattle keeping Tutsis moved into the region from the north and dominated the indigenous crop-growing (and lactose intolerant) Hutus. Crotty estimated that using the land for dairy farming yielded ten times the nutritional output of the same area used for raising beef. (Crop growing, again, is more productive and labour intensive.) The Tutsis existed on a diet consisting almost wholly of mild products.

I heard a radio programme earlier this year (it could have been in French, or Dutch, or some other language) where the Tutsi woman interviewed, who had suffered in the massacre, admitted (almost in passing) that the Tutsis have a complicated system of marriage customs taboos which reminded me of the Indian caste system in so far (again, as I recall) to maintain their separate identity and avoid their absorbtion into the Hutu (I think) majority. This was said almost in passing and I wonder how many of the listeners picked it up.

The Irish are too mild and are doomed. One town is now only 40% White and they are beginning to become upset. They feel they’ve taken in their “share” of muds and don’t want any Syrian refugees. No doubt the share croppers will be brow beaten into it. Maybe the Syrians could stop Ireland from becoming a colony of Nigeria? Doomed.

Ballyhaunis is only down the road from where my parents came from. It’s a shame to see this happen although of course there are others who regards it as progress. I am a natural conservative and believe that change should be very cautious and gradual.